Christmas 2020

 

Hurtado Christmas Letter 2020

Hi everybody,

This is Ellie Hurtado. I am writing this letter for my dad because my mom wouldn’t let him send out the one he wrote.  If you want to read his version, just let him know and I’m sure he’d be happy to oblige.

So he gave me these instructions:  

“Start with a holiday greeting and then say some generic stuff about our family. Then add a paragraph of the junk your mom did, a paragraph of the junk I did, a paragraph for Rainer, a paragraph for Davey and a paragraph for you.  Then tie it up in a sappy Christmas bow and you’re done.” He also said to keep the whole thing under a page because “nobody but your grandmas will read a second page.” 

 

Here goes:

Merry Christmas.  

Our year began with a really fun family vacation in Rosarito, Mexico. We had a great time riding ATVs on the beach and eating lots of tacos and stuff. It was supposed to be our last hurrah before Rainer left on his mission to Jacksonville Florida.  Then Covid happened.  Rainer was so courageous for the time that he was able to serve in Saint Augustine and Lake City.  We are so proud of him.   

A lot of things got cancelled this year.  But there was a big parade and major parental pride at Davey’s high school graduation.  He started working full time at our shop during the summer and he is going on a mission to Arequipa Peru in March.  This happens to be where my great-grandpa Hurtado was from.  

I personally liked school a lot better when Covid cancelled everything and it all went online.  School in pajamas isn’t too bad and I have been learning to watercolor and drive, both of which aren’t as hard as I thought they would be.

Dad had a bad year though. In July he suddenly got very sick. He spent two months in the hospital. The doctors still don’t know what happened exactly but he underwent major surgery and awaits more procedures and operations.

As you can imagine Mom had a tough year too. She had to take care of our store without Dad and also manage the household and everything else.  She helped Dad at the hospital everyday.  And since everyone was stuck at home, a lot of people decided to buy scooters this year so Mom was so busy.  I even worked at the shop to help. 

Since Dad got home things are a little bit calmer but his recovery is very slow.  He feels like he aged 40 years.  We finished up the year with a trip to Zion National Park as a family.  Dad and Davey also went to San Antonio to get some Texas BBQ.

Now I am supposed to write something uplifting but also honest about this year. 

Here goes:

While I am tempted to just say “this year was the worst” (which I wrote in my first draft), that would be ungrateful to all of the people who have blessed us and helped us along the way. There is so much we are thankful for. 

This year has been one of the hardest years of our lives, and I know many people feel the same. While everyone in our family has struggled with their own individual issues and with bigger issues (i.e. dad almost dying) we have been blessed by the kindness of others. Our friends and family have reached out to us in so many ways to lighten our load and so has the Savior. 

At the conclusion of 2020, I would love to say good riddance. Good riddance to pain, loneliness, and suffering. While I wish that everything would go back to normal on January 1st (no more pandemic, no more masks, and no more insanity) things probably won’t be much different for a while.  But our spirits can take cheer and hope for better things. We can still serve each other, love each other, become better people, and my dad can get better.  Let’s have a good 2021 despite our circumstances.  

Love Ellie Hurtado

Dave’s 2020 Christmas Letter

As we approach the final days of 2020, there is one question on all of our minds: What the hell just happened?

I mean, one minute America was minding its own business, ignoring rising temperatures, rising fascism, emboldened white supremacy, and rising numbers of dead, and the next minute downtown Salt Lake City was shaken like a salt shaker. The angel Moroni who had been chilling atop the temple for about 150 years, in a gesture pregnant with symbolism, chucked his trump(et), and a pandemic was unleashed upon the entire earth.  At this point there were still about eight or nine months left in the year, and it seemed like things couldn’t possibly get worse. 

Boy were we ever wrong. The trip to Italy I had been planning for several months, the one for which I learned Italian for Pete’s sake, the one where we would have spent Easter in Rome was canceled. Apparently they were too busy over there stacking corpses on rented freezer trucks to entertain a few tourists. 

But it turned out to be a good thing that our trip was canceled because we only had tickets for four of us since Rainer would surely be on his mission in April. But it turned out he wasn’t because the whole frickin’ MTC was shut down. 

Oh well. With an economic crash on the horizon like the asteroid that wiped out the dinosaurs, 

the party of fiscal responsibility fired up the printing presses and pulled a bunch of money out of their wrinkly white butts, a huge amount of which went to their fat cat pals with zero accountability, but also almost everyone got a check for $1200. (Although the checks were delayed because the egomaniac-in-chief wanted to put his name on them, presumably in gold sharpie.) This had the intended effect of stimulating the economy because many Americans are too stupid to save for a rainy day and immediately ran to their nearest retailer and asked, “what do you have that costs $1200?”

As a result, recreational vehicle dealers and bicycle shops saw a huge spike in demand. It’s probably safe to assume that drug dealers had a great year too. We started selling a metric pantload of scooters and that was good. Kaerlig and I were both putting in crazy hours trying to keep up with business. I hadn’t worked so hard since I was in my 20’s and Kaerlig hadn’t worked so hard since the previous week. So when I started to feel crappy and worn out I just chalked it up to fatigue and kept going. Weeks were flying by in a blur when suddenly on June 26th I hit a wall. I thought it was the plague at first but my only symptom was intense stomach pain. I basically stopped eating, but to no avail, and by mid July, I made my third trip to the ER. Kaerlig insisted we go back after I woke her up with my sobbing. Since I wasn’t bleeding from any orifices, and the CT scans didn’t show anything too alarming, they were about to send me home again when I began bleeding from an orifice and got my admission ticket to the hospital proper. This turned into a really fun two-month adventure I’ll go into in greater detail later. 

Another thing people blew their $1200 on was toilet paper, because everyone took a look at their food storage and realized that what was missing was 1000 rolls of single ply. Also people bought a lot of guns, presumably to murder any chap-cheeked, desperate neighbors in dire need of a spare square. Society’s descent into madness was accelerated by the fact that with theaters basically shuttered and Hollywood on idle, the summer blockbuster was a snuff film in which a police officer defiantly knelt on a mans neck, and slowly murdered him for allegedly writing a bad check, while glaring at the assembled crowd. 

We all saw the same thing, but as if half of Americans lived in Bizarro America, where everything is backwards and Superman is a bad guy; we came to starkly different conclusions. The toilet paper stockpiling militia types decided that the real hero in the film was the murderer cop, and so they came out en masse dressed in their Ammon Bundy best to intimidate, I mean protect, law abiding, angry citizens. 

One such turd burglar, a 17 year old with the pre-existing condition of an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, even crossed state lines with a borrowed rifle in order to grab a piece of that hot murder action, killing two protesters and injuring a third.  He was promptly praised for his bravery by a man who dodged Vietnam by having dubious bone spurs, which didn’t bother him enough to keep him from partying every weekend at Studio 54, dodging STD’s while tens of thousands of his countrymen tried and failed to dodge bullets and bled out in the jungle. 

Speaking of bleeding out, that’s what happened to me at the hospital. I bled so fast that the two dozen bags of blood product they pumped directly into my jugular vein really only had a short tour of my circulatory system before ending up on the floor. I was alert enough to hear the doctor warn the dozen or so frantic assistants not to slip in the spreading puddle. 

In some ways being in the hospital was a nice break from the insanity happening outside. Instead of watching in horror as even simple public health measures like mask wearing became partisan political footballs, I watched about thirteen episodes of Andy Griffith every day. Trying hard not to die and having part of my bowel removed left me with insufficient craps to give about current events. 

When I got out of the hospital after having learned to eat, walk and dress myself again, I gradually regained the strength to care, and was able to cast my ballot for the only sane choice, who by the grace of God won the presidency. Unfortunately, though the choice should have been as obvious as choosing Coke over Covid cola, the numbers were a lot closer to Coke vs Pepsi, and the partisan divide grew even wider. 

Currently many conservatives, being fed up with the liberal bias of reality, are doubling down by abandoning Facebook and Twitter in favor of Parler, an echo-chamber for the willfully ill-informed. This new social media outlet is primarily being used to share pictures of favorite guns and to plan a “million MAGA march” on Washington. I’m no expert but it seems “MAGA” has come to mean “Militant A-holes Getting Angrier.”

And while we’re on the subject of A-holes, I don’t use mine anymore. They tore me a new one. We named it Craig. Everyone hates Craig. He loudly announces his presence at really embarrassing times. It’s like firecrackers exploding in a bucket of latex paint. But there’s nothing I can do about it. He’s kind of a butthole. 

As 2020 rattles off its last fetid flatulence, I sincerely pray that the new year isn’t as miserable for any of us. But who are we kidding? It’s probably gonna suck too. Maybe we’ll all get another $1200 bucks though. I’ve got my eye on another operation. 

Merry Christmas 

David Hurtado