From: Devil's Island Resort, French Guiana.

The time has come, once again, to let our faithful readers join our annual 100% Fact-Free -Christmas-Newsletter, already in progress. Our humble family has been as busy as ever this year. Though last year's letter brought you news of a mother recently imprisoned, Mom is on parole for good behavior. I guess knitting socks for the warden is a good thing when you're cooling your heel in the joint. As I pen our yearly missive from my penal servitude in South America, my mind is drawn to our dearest Emily. While serving a full-time mission in Baltimore, Maryland, Emily has been doing double duty as a CIA mole. Undoubtedly she would be irked at me blowing her cover, but I simply must relay the following anecdote to laud her coolheadedness. Just last week, in fact, Emily was seen by NSA security agents casing the compound while under cover as a tourist visiting the National Cryptology Museum. Our fair Emily was brutally accosted and bedevilled by men claiming she was photographing the NSA compound. Her film was confiscated, dignity affronted, and she was sternly warned about endangering national security. Had our dear Mata Hari not kept her cool, her cover might well have been blown (as it now, most regrettably has been).

Mindy, the newest Gilkey, joined our little troupe of do-gooders in full stride. After finishing a Master's of Piano Performance at the University of Oregon, she declined a fellowship at Julliard. Poor Mindy's been in the hospital after donating a kidney and a portion of her liver to whomever was in direst need, and she just wasn't up to the trip. Someday I'm sure she'll make a generous donation and they'll name a chair for her in absentia. A brief stint in the ICU did little to slow down our little Mindy. As soon as she was out her sedation she tried to get out of bed to read to another patient who was blind. She's such a trooper, our Mindy. Lucky for us, the nurses intercepted Mindy as she was clambering out of bed. Musn't move too quickly after losing some organs, after all.

Mom, I mentioned before, was released early for good behavior. In the meantime, she has whiled away the hours researching our progenitors at the church genealogical library. She has now successfully traced our family line back to 500 BC, where our lineage joins with that of Darius, Emperor of Persia. Unfortunately, the records become patchy when dealing with such removed time periods. Also, Mother's crash course in cuneiform has not gone as well as she'd hoped ( the grammar's impossible she reports), so interpreting some of the census data has proved problematic.

Dad, the dear soul, spent most of the year abroad. Many of his communiquŽs had a rushed, covert, sound to them, so presumably he's up to his old tricks again, racing about the world in his Zodiac raft, saving whales and protecting Alaskan king crabs for Greenpeace. Being an Eco-terrorist has been hard on him though. After spending 3 months in a treehouse to save a particularly jumbo baobab in the Kenyan savannah, his health had seriously deteriorated. We tried to send him vitamin C pills, but he would have none of it. It was tribal medicine or nothing for him. I guess the shaman's prescriptions for scurvy weren't as effective as a couple of vitamin C tablets. Still you can't fault Dad's adherence to his distrust of western medicine.

Speaking of western medicine, that brings us to the last Gilkey in our little band. As I said earlier, I am enjoying some much deserved time off at a community service resort in French Guiana. Though long infamous for its reputation as a French penal hellhole, I have been finding the environment here particularly salubrious. After spending a stressful year ensconced in academia, I elected to spend some time in a sanatorium here in Guiana to restore my motivation for studying. The stress of trying to get good grades and fretting about medical school entrance exams was enough to send me around the bend.

I hope this letter finds you all in good spirits and enjoying the holiday season. I know our meager achievements pale in comparison with your own, so I will wish you all Merry Christmas and a happy Festivus ( for the rest of us),

Love, the Gilkey's: George, Mindy, Peter, Carolyn, Emily