What follows is another yearly installment in our family’s complete history told via the 2024 Flanders Family Christmas Update. To see a full listing, see Our Christmas Letters. For tips on writing your own family history in this fashion, follow this link. In the meantime, enjoy!
The 2024 Flanders Family Update
December 2023 Happenings
Doug’s parents joined us for our annual Christmas trip to San Antonio last December, although they were decidedly unimpressed by the urban sprawl that’s overtaken the city since they moved away nearly 40 years ago. No sooner had they arrived than they were ready to turn around and head back to New Mexico, but Doug coaxed them to stay with a delicious dinner and a promise that he’d do all the driving while they were in town.
Sadly, Samuel’s family got sick and missed most of the festivities, but Samuel was still able to emcee the Family Bible Memory Competition he and Bekah Joy sponsored last year. Ages 3-86 participated, with special prizes awarded for outstanding presentations. Daniel stood on his hands through his entire recitation of five passages on perseverance. Rebekah Lyn came clad in pajamas and sang a scriptural lullaby then quoted several verses that help her sleep whenever she feels anxious. Jonathan memorized the whole book of James, as did Mom, so they quoted the first 30+ verses together. Gabriel and Samuel recited passages in both sign language and Spanish. And our six-year-old granddaughter, Gwen, shared a different Bible verse for every letter of the alphabet. Jennifer won top honors (based on sheer volume of verses learned), but she used the $500 prize as seed money to sponsor monthly memory challenges for the kids and grandkids all year long.
Gabriel turned 16 this month and got his driver’s license, which he put to good use making several solo trips to Dallas and San Antonio this year to visit family and friends. He’s a conscientious driver, although a police officer did have to give him “a coupon” once for driving with his lights off after dusk.
David and Bonnie paid us a visit shortly before New Year’s. While they were here, David gave his younger siblings a crash course on finances, complete with whiteboard diagrams and PowerPoint slides. He even helped Daniel set up his first Roth IRA!
January 2024 Happenings
We headed to Florida on January 1. Daniel’s nursing school postponed orientation, so he came, too, as did Rachel. Audiobooks entertained us on the road (our first two books of the year, Understood Betsy and Another Gospel, were both superb).
We stopped in Vicksburg on the way and visited enough local museums and historical sites to earn free T-shirts for our entire family. There, a sociable stranger accosted us on the street shouting “Happy newya tooya!” and offering bizarre compliments: “Those are some pretty little white girls you got there,” he told Doug. “They look Chinese!”
We spent several days at Panama City Beach, riding bikes and soaking up sunshine before driving home, where ice storms and influenza conspired to keep the grandkids away for most of the month, leaving Mom with only our two youngest to educate.
Gabriel racked up more college credit via CLEP exams (now free of charge, thanks to modernstates.org) and online dual credit classes. He’s continued to chip away at his nursing prerequisites, but added in some pre-med coursework, as well, in case he decides to follow in Dad’s footsteps.
Abby posted the first of a series of craft tutorials on our family website this month. She shares her mom’s love for making things. Jennifer left a Christmas tree up in her bedroom all year, and Abby helped create new ornaments for each changing season: Valentine’s, Easter, Independence Day, Back-to-School, and Thanksgiving.
Rachel and Mom both spoke at the mother/daughter retreat our homeschool co-op sponsored this month. Their topics were Trusting God with Your Future and Cultivating Contentment, respectively. Jennifer wrote new lyrics for the “YMCA” song to perform as a skit with other event organizers. Her “M-A-M-A” version sounded a little cringey but got lots of laughs.
February 2024 Happenings
February took us to Fort Worth for the Cowtown Half-Marathon. Dad jogged and Gabriel ran the 13.1 miles, but Mom and Bethany walked, stopping for selfies at every mile marker and offering encouragement to other stragglers who were glad to have company bringing up the rear. Jennifer felt bad for holding her active daughter back, but Beth insisted the slow finish was well worth getting so much of Mom’s undivided attention.
A few of our kids’ passports expired this month, so we went to renew them and were checked in by a clerk who (unbeknownst to her) had waited on us several years earlier.
She rattled off the standard questions, but brightened when she heard we have 12 children and began telling us about another large family she’d processed in the past: “They had 16 kids!” she recalled with certitude. “That mom homeschooled, too, and the kids all grew up to be doctors and dentists and nurses.”
Suspecting she’d conflated our number of kids and grandkids in her memory, Jennifer winked at Doug and said she’d love to meet the woman, since it sounds like we have a lot in common.
“It’s funny you should say that,” the clerk answered, “because when you first walked in, I thought you were her,” she paused to regard Jennifer again over the top of her reading glasses, then shook her head slightly before finishing, “but she’s taller than you are and real slim.”
March 2024 Happenings
Jon & Haley left their kids with us for a week while they cruised the Caribbean in March, so we entertained them with zoo visits, read-alouds, movie nights, and a trip (with Rebekah) to Dallas to visit Beth.
Additionally, our younger kids played homeschool soccer this month, then traveled to San Antonio to help their brother move; Doug led our local precinct convention when the normal chair couldn’t make it; and Jennifer worked the polls during primaries, volunteered at the CCC sale, and gave a talk on learning differences to a local moms group.
April 2024 Happenings
We experienced a total solar eclipse in April, which made for a rare and memorable day.
Abby turned fourteen this month and had a few friends over for Pioneer Woman soup and salad served on fine china, followed by Little Women on the big screen (our name for the den wall after we remove furniture and artwork and hook up our trusty projector).
The next morning, we left on a 2½-week, 10-state road trip. We brought Nana and three of our grandkids along with us and made travel time as educational as we could with daily Spanish lessons (complete with tests), choice audiobooks, geography songs, and lots of fun, friendly competitions including foot-races, trivia tests, obstacle courses, and a few rousing rounds of “Name that State and Identify the Capital” played on the giant granite US map we spotted behind the Tri-State Museum in South Dakota.
Along the way, we explored six capitol buildings, seven museums, five national parks, two national monuments, one zoo, and an arboretum.
We also navigated one treacherous mountain pass (without plummeting to our deaths, thankfully) on a narrow, icy road that afforded little room for making a U-turn in a heavily loaded, 12-passenger van. We felt like kissing the ground once our hour-long-prayer-meeting-on-wheels made it back to the flat, dry valley.
The euphoric relief we felt in that moment topped many a list of high points recounted afterwards, but Nana’s low point surprised us all: A lifelong teetotaler, she told us her biggest disappointment was that she “kept falling asleep during our language lessons and never did learn how to ask how much a beer costs in Spanish!”
May 2024 Happenings
May brought us another grandson, Luke, whom Mikayla delivered on Cinco de Mayo. He is all smiles and especially fond of Grandpa.
David and Bonnie’s kids stayed at our house a few days while Bonnie traveled and David worked (he graduated from his pediatric dental fellowship in June—yay!—and Bethany has only one more year left in the same program). No sooner had we returned that set of grandkids to their parents than Samuel and Bekah dropped their three off on the way to Wichita, where Samuel filmed a review course for the OSCE portion of the anesthesia boards at the request of Ultimate Board Prep, to make his highly popular tutoring sessions easier to scale. When asked about his qualifications to teach, Samuel points not to the perfect score he made on his own exit exam, but to the two benchmark tests he failed during medical school which fueled his determination to crack the code and gave him tremendous empathy for other students who struggle.
We spent the rest of May attending the RPT convention in San Antonio, cheering for the Mavs in the playoffs, and picking wild blackberries in a fun community event Gabriel coordinated.
June 2024 Happenings
One Sunday morning in June during our weekly “small group” meeting at Einstein Bagels, Doug was bemoaning the fact that his now-mostly-white beard ages him by a good 10-15 years and admitted he probably needed to shave it. “Or you could just diet,” our good friend and family dentist, Clay Cannon, cheerfully suggested as an alternative route to a more youthful appearance. Doug and Jennifer, equally stunned and impressed by this blunt assessment, were grateful he was willing to tell us the truth, even if it hurts—the mark of a true friend. Clay claims he never meant to malign anyone’s weight; he was merely suggesting that Doug color his beard (i.e., “dye it”) to look younger.
Nevertheless, the presumed tough-love comment had already hit its mark. So, in addition to vigilantly tracking his food intake, Doug started swimming a mile every other day and forgoing his beloved bacon for a daily breakfast of one apple, an ounce of mixed nuts, half a cup of blueberries, and a slice of avocado toast made of Ezekiel bread and topped with turmeric, black and cayenne pepper, and sesame and chia seeds.
Long story short, by fall he’d developed a nice tan, dropped 15 pounds, and did indeed sport a more youthful glow (at least until “No Shave November” arrived and he started resembling Earnest Hemingway again).
We drove back to Cashiers, North Carolina, and hiked to some gorgeous waterfalls this month. Even Nana made it to the bottom of Dry Falls (so named because you can pass behind the waterfall without getting drenched) and back up again.
We spotted an extensive collection of bronze statuary in front of a shop in Highlands and bought three beautiful, life-size statues—two children plus one rabbit. The friendly artist didn’t take credit cards, but he obligingly wrapped and loaded the heavy pieces in our van, shook Doug’s hand, and told him, “Just send me a check when you get home.”
July 2024 Happenings
The family congregated at Kallahari in Round Rock in July, minus Jonathan’s crew (who were vacationing in Arkansas) and David’s wife, Bonnie (who stayed home with their beautiful, two-week-old daughter, Ellaviere). We had a blast hanging out at the waterpark and managed to get some decent family portraits, as well, despite the fact several of us felt fairly famished at the time, including two newly expectant daughters-in-law, Emi and Bekah Joy, who’ll bring our total grandkid count to 24 next spring.
It was over dinner that weekend we heard (from Isaac) about the assassination attempt made against President Trump in Pennsylvania and first saw the iconic photos documenting the divine intervention that spared his life.
July also marked the opening of the summer Olympics, so we staged a few games of our own. Friends and family joined us for competitive rounds of cherry pit spitting, watermelon eating, water balloon tossing, and more. Joseph won most of the gold medals, especially distinguishing himself in our arm-wrestling tournament. (All that overhead electrical work he does on the daily has developed impressively large biceps!)
Doug drove Jennifer and her mother to Oklahoma this month to visit Aunt Betty. She passed away on Nana’s 87th birthday in October, leaving Jennifer’s mom the sole survivor of thirteen siblings.
Rebekah flew to Jordan in late July to spend three months doing relief work, helping staff a tuberculosis hospital, and attending language school. She gave an informative and engaging PowerPoint presentation to family and friends before she left (making slides is Bek’s super-power), then kept us all updated while abroad with equally enthralling emails, liberally sprinkled with funny GIFs and new Arabic vocabulary words, like habibti (my darling/ my love), yallah (hurry up/let’s go), and La’a shukran (no thank you).
August 2024 Happenings
Rachel applied to the sonography school at TJC this year, and while she was called back for an interview, she didn’t get a spot in that small but highly competitive program.
So in August, she pivoted and took a job in Europe serving as an au pair for a family with five children.
She arrived in time to accompany them on their summer holiday, traveling to Norway, Denmark, and Sweden before returning to their home in Germany, where she’ll live and work for a year.
We miss her terribly, but are excited to see her expanding her horizons: learning German (in weekly language classes), finding community (in an English-speaking church about an hour away), and touring the countryside (by both Vespa and train).
[Just before Rachel left] Our family was in route to St. Augustine when we learned Florida was evacuating in preparation for what would prove to be a devastating hurricane season, so we changed course and headed to Hot Springs instead.
Benjamin and Mikayla met us there (which always ramps up the fun factor), and we spent the week exploring Garvin Woodland Gardens, the Mid-America Science Museum, and Hot Springs National Park.
School resumed a week after our return. In addition to two levels of Algebra, Mom’s teaching a class in leather working and wood burning at co-op on Mondays. The rest of the week, she does lessons at home with Abigail and our three oldest grandkids.
September 2024 Happenings
Doug, Jennifer, and Abby flew to Colorado Springs to meet up with Doug’s parents for a few days of sightseeing in September.
We visited the Pioneers Museum, the Olympic Museum, the Garden of the Gods, plus several local thrift shops, where Jennifer found a pair of drapery panels in a heavy blue and white fabric which she bought (with her senior discount) and used to reupholster all ten of our dining room chairs. They look fantastic!
Sadly, the boys passed around a stomach bug while we were gone. Daniel, who’s now in his third semester of nursing school and is working as an extern in cardiac ICU, told us he felt 98% well when we left for the airport but declined rapidly and was throwing up long before we reached our destination.
We spent back-to-back weekends in Dallas visiting Nana, Beth, and Jennifer’s sister, and trying to front-load time spent with David’s family before the Army sends them to South Korea for two years.
[Note: At time of departure, David’s still the tallest member of our family, but Gabriel (at 6’6½”) is closing in fast, so big brother left a mark on our doorjamb to let Gabbers know if/when he passes him.]
In honor of their 50th wedding anniversary, Jennifer’s former youth pastor and his wife, David and Marilyn Drake, returned to Mesquite for a reunion—the first of its kind in 43 years—with the (no longer) young people they’d served in the late 70s/early 80s.
It was fun to reconnect with so many friends from those formative years, including Mom’s high school sweetheart, Larry, with whom Doug hit it off royally. Mom made fast friends, as well, with Larry’s adventurous and winsome wife, Carolyn, who’s already volunteered to drive back to Texas anytime Jennifer works up the nerve to go skydiving and make the jump alongside her!
October 2024 Happenings
October took us back to Family Camp where we enjoyed perfect weather this year. We slept in tents and hammocks instead of renting an RV, which kept Mom happy, but she returned home with Dad nearly every morning for hot showers, a quick load of laundry, and a moment of privacy, which kept him happy, too.
Most of the kids and grands came to camp for at least part of the week. Bethany drove out twice from Dallas, even bringing Nana with her one evening for a brisk hayride, a barbecue dinner, and a blazing campfire.
We didn’t play any ultimate Frisbee this year but did win a non-competitive volleyball tournament, although a few on our team (read: Doug and Mikayla) felt more competitive than others (namely Ben, who titrated his drive to dominate down to 25% to ensure plenty of play time for all).
Abby—who at 14 is finally old enough to play by camp rules—served as our team captain. Our opponents were such sweet families (with such lively daughters), it made us wish Dan and Gabriel could’ve spent the whole week in Big Sandy instead of having to divide their time between campus and campsite.
Isaac took home first place again in UT Tyler’s Engineering Olympics this month; he also accepted a summer internship with Eastman Chemical in Longview. Since the job includes an apartment, Gabriel called dibs on brother’s bed and desk, but Isaac assures us he’ll be home weekly to see family and hang out with his girlfriend, Kassidy.
November 2024 Happenings
Rebekah made it back from the Middle East in November (just in time to vote!) and stayed a full two weeks before flying to Peru for another international nursing gig.
We returned to Branson this month, our first visit since parting with BlueGreen. Nana came, too, and astounded us all by nimbly climbing over a steep row of theater seats to make a faster exit—a story Doug loves to embellish with a “Hold my purse and watch this” attribution.
The rest of November was spent preparing for Thanksgiving: training for the Turkey Trot, baking pies, stuffing Christmas cards, and readying our entries for Samuel and Bekah’s 2024 Family Challenge: “Create an original, 2- to 10-minute video on a STEM topic of your choice.” This letter went to print before winners were announced, so that news will have to wait until next year.
In the meantime, we wish you a merry and meaningful Christmas celebrating the Word made flesh who dwelt among us, died for our sin, rose from the grave, and will one day return. May Jesus find us faithful when He comes!
With love from the Flanders Family –
Doug & Jennifer, Jon & Haley, Bethany, David & Bonnie, Samuel & Bekah, Ben & Mikayla, J.T. & Emi, Rebekah, Rachel, Isaac, Daniel, Gabriel, Abby, and all the grandkids
www.flandersfamily.info | lovinglifeathome.com | alltruthisgodstruth.com
<< last year
