“One of these days I’m gonna sit down and write a long letter to all the good friends I’ve known, and I’m gonna try and thank them all for the good times together though so apart we’ve grown.” (Full disclaimer: I didn’t write that– Neil Young did.) So to all my friends, casual acquaintances, and complete strangers who just randomly happened across my website, I give you my (hopefully not too) long letter.

“Goodbye 145276, hello 140513” After driving the same UPS truck for the past 13 years, I got to work one day and found a different truck parked in my spot. I approached my center manager who explained how he took 145276 to a farm upstate where she can relax and briefly enjoy the fresh air before being violently crushed in an industrial hydraulic press and unceremoniously dumped into a nearby scrapyard. My mathematically inclined readers might notice that 145276>140513. Yes– somehow I managed to receive an even older truck.

“Panama: A man clap trap cabana nap” is a world famous palindrome AND accurate title for our spring break festivities. While I’m sure some alert readers and every half sentient AI bot out there will proudly proclaim “That’s not the same backwards and forwards!” I counter with “prove it isn’t a palindrome in some strange language such as binary or Bostonian!”

We choose Panama for a vacation for two main reasons. Number one: I’m turning into an old man who really likes to only book direct airline flights from Denver International Airport. Number two: I was filing my taxes through Turbo Tax last year and it specifically asked me if I was the owner of any previously undeclared Panamanian bank accounts. The answer was “No,” but it got me thinking that I should at least look into the idea a bit. 

Our flight landed at the lovely time of 4:56am local time. We got through customs in five minutes as we didn’t check in any luggage and at 5:08am we were trying to find the metro station. The only person we could find in the area was a lone taxi driver who flat out denied any existence of a metro station and kept showing us videos of a monkey island he could drive us to. Despite his best efforts we located the metro station, completely avoided Monkey Island, and made it to our hotel safely.

I don’t like to brag, but our Airbnb was located on the 62nd floor. (Honestly, I didn’t even know we would be that high up until we got there.) On the first night in the room I stood out on the balcony and pointed to the “medium old” part of town and said we should walk over there in the morning. The problem is that when you are so high off the ground things don’t look nearly as far away as at ground level. (Incidentally, this applies equally well for regular people, flat Earthers, and Halo enthusiasts.) This led to an excess of sunburn, crankiness, whining, and hunger by the evening. And it wasn’t just me this time. Aside from this slight hiccup, the trip was a success as I got to torment my offspring by starting off every conversation with the local population with the cat joke. Seriously, they REALLY hate when I do that.

Nothing brings a family together like a good ole fashioned elaborate fake holiday ruse. My brother-in-law and his family came to visit us in June and we wanted to stage a surprise birthday party for his daughter at the end of their stay. We were so afraid she would catch on to our plan we felt the best, no, truly ONLY, option was to spend the entire week talking about our plans for “Mountain Time Zone Appreciation Day.” Being from Michagan, they had absolutely no way of realizing this was a completely made up holiday. We kept sprinkling in details of the holiday all throughout the week to keep everyone unaware of our true intentions. In the end, to be honest, they didn’t really care too much one way or the other.

In Community news, (“Six seasons and a movie!”) the movie is stuck in a holding pattern worse than at Newark airport during the annual Sopranos convention. But in my own special tribute to the show I found the creepiest image of the human being mascot from the show on the internet, printed it out, and quietly slid it into Isabel’s mellophone case while nobody was looking. While that may seem beyond completely random, the sophomores in the band were tasked with wearing predominantly white outfits that day and it seemed like the most logical outfit to achieve this goal. (NOTE TO READERS: I add stuff like this so when I’m crazy old I can look back and remember the fun times when I was more than just a head in a jar on a forgotten shelf in the basement of my ungrateful great great half son in law. CAN SOMEONE PLEASE GET THAT SPIDER OFF MY JAR! THAT’S ALL I’M ASKING FOR!)

This summer I was looking through our automobile stable and decided it was time to add another stallion to the mix. OK, ok, maybe a Nissan Leaf isn’t really a “stallion” of the car world. Let me think of a more appropriate analogy here. I’ve got one– this summer I was in the market to add a solid third-string car to our roster when I got wind of a veteran left outfielder with perhaps a few decent years left released on waivers due to an over-hyped prospect coming up from the farm team. Now the world of electric vehicles in Colorado is, well, unique. A few years ago we test drove a Nissan Leaf for two hours and the dealership didn’t even call me back. Due to reasons beyond my understanding, the situation completely reversed and Nissan began a policy of basically giving away Leafs to the first 500 people who came in to check out their newly built dealership in Fort Collins. This is a solid vehicle– over 700,000 have been sold since 2010. No, it isn’t perfect, but it gets me to work and really all I need to do is plug it every couple of weeks to fill the battery with electrons, positrons, or tachyons. (AUTOMOTIVE DISCLAIMER: adding the incorrect type of subatomic particle to your electric vehicle can cause decreased acceleration and possible destruction of the space-time continuum.)

I’m going to wrap things up with an original, insightful, and possibly true nugget of wisdom I shared with a young woman on my route who was getting married in September. I told her that a new marriage is 85% having a roommate, 10% having a financial partner, and 5% enjoying “other” activities. I really believe she took it to heart more than my other advice which was to be married in their own shallow graves like Dwight and Angela from “The Office.”

I fed my entire website into Google Gemini 2.5 and asked it to write a new Christmas Letter. Here is what it produced!

The Lutfey Letter – 2026 Edition: Is This Thing Still On?

Greetings Earthlings, Fellow Humans, and Potential Future Pen Pals!

Another year has zipped by faster than a UPS truck trying to make express delivery cutoffs before a three-day weekend. It’s time once again for the annual Lutfey family chronicle, painstakingly curated for your amusement and/or bewilderment. If you’re reading this, congratulations! You’ve survived another orbit around the sun, or you’ve successfully guessed the password to the archives. Either way, pull up a chair, grab a beverage (preferably not one that will stain the upholstery when you inevitably spit-take), and let’s dive in.

First, a programming note: After extensive internal debate (mostly involving me trying to convince Buddy the Bagel hound about the merits of third-person narration), we’ve decided against writing this year’s letter entirely from his perspective. While his insights into optimal napping locations and the philosophical implications of unattended food scraps are profound, his grasp of grammar remains… developing. So, you’re stuck with me again.

The Lutfey household continues its slow, inexorable march towards… well, something. Katherine remains the bedrock of sanity, somehow managing work, life, and the rest of us without (visibly) resorting to questionable coping mechanisms. Isabel is now navigating the treacherous waters of late high school – a confusing blend of demanding independence while simultaneously needing someone to locate her keys/phone/left shoe approximately every fifteen minutes. College applications loom, bringing with them the existential dread of essay prompts and the logistical nightmare of campus tours where every guide sounds suspiciously like a game show host. Samantha, deep in the throes of mid-teendom, communicates primarily through eye-rolls, cryptic slang I need an urban dictionary to decipher, and the occasional grunt that might mean “hello” or possibly “the dog just ate my homework.” Speaking of the dog, Buddy continues his quest for unsupervised counter-surfing glory and has taken up interpretive dance as a means of requesting walks.

My tenure as a UPS driver continues, providing daily doses of exercise, existential contemplation at traffic lights, and interactions with the fascinating tapestry of humanity (and their dogs, some of whom have very specific delivery protocols). My route remains a source of endless anthropological study. Discovered this year: the sheer volume of inflatable lawn decorations one neighborhood can sustain defies both logic and HOA regulations. Also, the mystery of the disappearing garden gnomes on Elm Street took a dark turn involving a squirrel, a misunderstanding over acorns, and witness protection. Don’t ask.

On the project front, the basement workshop continues to occasionally produce items slightly less dangerous than originally conceived. The CNC machine was recently employed to carve highly intricate patterns into… toast. Don’t judge; breakfast has never been more aesthetically pleasing, or generated more crumbs. My quest to learn Dungeons and Dragons hit a snag when my one-eyed cleric accidentally polymorphed the party’s barbarian into a throw pillow during a critical negotiation with a goblin king. Apparently, “persuasion” and “pillow-morph” sound similar when shouted during combat. Who knew? My patent for the energy-saving remote control holder hasn’t resulted in untold riches yet, but I did get a very nice rejection letter from a major electronics company on what appeared to be recycled papyrus. Progress!

We didn’t manage any intercontinental travel this year, unless you count Isabel’s virtual reality tour of the Martian colonies for a school project, which mostly involved her complaining about the questionable Wi-Fi signal near Olympus Mons. We did, however, brave the crowds for the annual Kinetics race, entering this year as “The Existential Squirrels.” Our craft, a marvel of engineering involving repurposed lawn furniture and an alarming number of zip ties, performed flawlessly right up until the moment it encountered water, at which point it achieved buoyancy levels previously only seen in anvils. We may not have won, but our dramatic sinking garnered sympathetic applause and possibly a tetanus shot for the pilot (me).

As I gaze out the window at the suspiciously quiet suburban landscape (are the squirrels plotting again?), I find myself pondering the big questions. Like, why do they call it rush hour when nothing moves? And will humanity ever perfect the art of the silent snack bag opening for movie theaters? The world needs these answers, and possibly more space cowboys.

That seems to be the Lutfey experience, circa 2026. May your holidays be filled with joy, your Wi-Fi be strong, and your pets refrain from eating inedible objects. Until next year, remember the wise words often attributed (probably incorrectly) to various historical figures, but which I’m claiming for myself right now:

“Life is weird. Embrace the weird. And maybe hide the good snacks.”

Warmly (or possibly just suffering from poor thermostat regulation),

Omar Lutfey

It was just another typical retro 80’s Saturday night for me– I started streaming the original Tron movie on my 75 inch flat screen television, pulled out a cold six pack of Jolt soda from the refrigerator, and popped in a 5.25 inch floppy disc into my gaming computer which contained a slightly pirated version of “The Oregon Trail.” I was so excited to start the game that I hardly noticed the freak electrical storm brewing outside.

I can’t say exactly what happened next, but Jeff Bridges was playing glow in the dark death Frisbee, the last empty soda can fell on the carpet unnoticed, and the largest atmospheric electrical discharge ever recorded by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration all occurred the nanosecond the game’s title screen appeared on the monitor. In defiance of all the known laws of man and science, I suddenly existed solely INSIDE The Oregon Trail!

The game is in some ways similar to the matrix in The Matrix. Pretty much everything is reduced black and bright green characters on the screen. However, due to technological restrictions of the time, characters in The Oregon Trail game can’t do super cool things like learn Kung Fu in three seconds, stop bullets mid-air with their thoughts, or eat fresh baked cookies from the Oracle. 

Despite these limitations, I quickly adapted to life on the trail. The first decision I was faced with involved what type of transportation to purchase. I splurged and bought a top of the line model. This thing had everything– four wheels (no, not four wheel drive, just four wheels), a cover, and only a few large holes in the floor. I expect this will help to minimize loss of supplies and offspring throughout the journey. At the start of the journey I proclaimed, “No farting in the covered wagon!” In all honesty, my family did quite well adhering to this rule. The oxen, on the other hand, were in no way shy about clearing out *everything* from their lower bowels at any random moment in time. At least I would have the courtesy to run behind a rock when I needed to take care of business.

The journey across the Oregon Trail is filled with many unique dangers. While many travelers have been forced to deal with coyotes, bears, and sharknados, our largest setback involved fording a river during the peak of spring runoff. “Let’s just go around it!” was the first thought that came out of my mouth. It turns out that was a really, really bad idea. Plan B involved scavenging the area for materials until we were able to build a rudimentary CNC machine. Once this was functioning properly we used it to build a slightly less rudimentary saw mill. From there we applied to the local water resource management agency and in six to nine weeks we received a permit to build a temporary bridge. Once this was completed the crossing was a breeze.

After a few weeks on the trail everything settled into a predictable routine. While our navigation system was rudimentary at best, I suspected the end of our journey was near. One night, after the wagons had been circled and dinner had been served I took a moment to reflect on my video game life. The moon was nowhere to be seen and the cloudy arms of the milky way stretched clearly across the sky. Everything just seemed like it was going to work out OK. The cook, who looked exactly, and I mean spot on, like Sam Elliot from The Big Lebowski, was just finishing drying off the last mug with a dirty towel and wandered over to me for a few words.

Sam: I’ve got two things to say. First of all, when children are old enough to be afraid of the dark they aren’t REALLY afraid of the dark, they are just beginning to understand the utility of the light.

Me: Yeah, wow, that really makes a lot of sense. I guess I never really thought of it that way. What is the second thing?

Sam: You just died of dysentery.

Me: That’s shitty.

Sam: Yeah, you should have gotten that looked at the last town instead of sneaking off to the brothel.

January 1, 2024 7:04 AM: Omar’s eyes shoot open and he proclaims to his still sleeping wife, “I need to ride my bicycle on a volcano in Iceland!”

Kat rolls her eyes. Said gesture might have been more effective if she was facing him or her eyelids were open.

[SUDDEN LOUD VINYL RECORD SCRATCHING NOISE] Reality check: this is NOT how it “HAPPENED”, but rather how it FEELS like it SHOULD have happened. Four years ago we planned a complete trip to Iceland when, for reasons that escape my mind at the moment, a recreational international travel ban forced us to stay home. In November (when I have to pick my vacation weeks for the next year) we decided to dust off this itinerary and give it another shot. More on the actual trip later on in the letter.

While I’m on the topic of things that didn’t actually happen in 2024, I bought a Tesla Model 3 at the very end of 2023. I ran some calculations, and apparently I would be turning 50 in April and had yet to buy a mid-life crisis vehicle. The upside to putting this off for so long is that I am now going to live to be exactly 100 years old. If you are expecting an extensive argument of why I made this particular automobile choice I would strongly recommend temporarily switching over to Elon Musk’s Christmas Letter. I am really enjoying the car and my family is more than happy with the extensive list of new rules I’ve established starting with “No farting in the Tesla!”

So more on this turning 50 thing– while I’m generally not one to celebrate my own birthday, the fact that my age is divisible by five AND two seems like a good reason to make an exception to this rule. My first idea was to recreate “Encounter at Farpoint” (the pilot episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, obviously) where I would play the omnipotent “Q” and place my friends and family on trial for the crimes of all humanity. While in many, many ways this really is the best idea that has ever been outputted from my brain matrix, I did compromise a bit and settled on a more modest “game afternoon” theme. The event went well and Isabel and I both sang our favorite (different) “Free Credit Report” jingles. I sang the original pirate version and Isabel preferred the roller coaster lyrics. And, yes, for those who were at my wedding, it was the same version I sang when I managed to control the microphone during the reception.

Welcome to “later on in the letter.” Moving up from the Iceland trip past-past to the past-now, we spent 10 days driving around a small island in the northern Atlantic.

The scenery of Iceland was nothing short of amazing. I would stand in places outdoors and think I was looking at a hand-painted matte print from an episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Since our trip included the summer solstice we had the experience of it not ever being night time– so I guess technically we were only there for one day. Basically every movie and television show that is awesome was filmed in this country. If only Breaking Bad could have found a way to film here…

So while I was writing this letter I placed a cup of coffee on the table next to my chair before I sat down. Once I got situated with my laptop and put my feet up I tried to reach for the refreshing beverage but it turned out to be just out of my reach. I thought to myself “Man, that cup is REALLY far away.” Then I started thinking about one of the Airbnbs we stayed at in Iceland. Here are the steps to get there:

1. Drive to Denver International Airport
2. Fly for seven hours to an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.
3. Take a rental car 400 miles to the less inhabited east side of the country
4. Turn off the ring highway and drive three miles on the dirt road until you finally go around a turn and a very well appointed building magically appears with a young woman standing there to tell us which room is ours for the night.

Now that, I must say, is REALLY far away.

One final point to wrap up our vacation– no, I didn’t ride my bike on a volcano. First of all there was the cost of getting my bike there, and next was the logistics of moving my bike around the whole time, and finally, and probably most importantly, was that none of my fellow travelers had any interest in partaking in this activity.

That about wraps it up for the year. I thought I would end this letter with my favorite DM exchange of the year.

Scott: She admits she is completely into me and called me “hot” on our first date.

Omar: That’s a big red flag.

Scott: Things have been moving quickly since we met face to face two weeks ago.

Omar: I’m sorry, I’m still laughing at what I just wrote. Isabel is looking at me like I’m more nuts than usual.

Scott: Two laughing/crying emojis. No, you are not. You love it. I can literally hear you laugh.

Wait, wait, wait– there is still a bit of space left at the bottom of the page here, so I think I can squeeze in a new segment I’m calling “Morbid confessions of a serial Christmas letter writer,” 

Sometimes, when I can’t sleep in the middle of the night, I go downstairs, turn on my laptop, put on my headphones, and listen to Kenny Rogers music for two hours straight. If that doesn’t put me to sleep I’ll fire up Youtube and watch him on The Muppet Show. I may have said too much.