It’s that time once again, when the Thompsons take a break from longing for the sweet release of death in order to gather around a festive personal computer and offer you, our dear friends, warm holiday greetings and to fill you in on the monotonous and meaningless minutia of our everyday lives. And vice versa.

The big news this year, of course, is our new house. Most of you have already seen pictures of it, either in e-mails or in the September 4 issue of “The Weekly World News.” This one bedroom, six bath, four kitchen charmer is located on an unincorporated lot out near Hadleyville. Set among the gleaming steel and humming wires of several hundred power lines and General Electric towers, this rustic getaway is something of a “fixer upper” – but we find life without a floor, windows or sewage to be nothing less than a rustic paradise. Except for the ceaseless chanting and tortured screams emanating from the cult compound next door, our new home is peaceful in the extreme – and it’ll be even nicer, once the roof goes on and the offal has been carted away.

Frank continues to be a guy-on-the-go and a man-about-town and a raconteur-without-stories – and he could probably be described with even more colorful hyphenated phrases, should you be so inclined. And speaking of being inclined, his characteristic “tilted walk” was corrected in June when doctors discovered that he has habitually worn a tennis shoe on his left foot and a normal kitchen chair on his right. Boy, was his face red. And it was even redder when he inadvertently took a nap in his lobster bisque.

Claire’s leaps and bounds are selling like hotcakes, and her hotcake business is growing by leaps and bounds. She remains immersed in her favorite charity group “Orphans With Unexplained Rashes” and spends most of her free time baking Chutney loaves, delivering homemade Skittles and helping to create this year’s fund-raising pageant, entitled “There’s No Unguent For Love.”

Our eldest “son,” Winstanley, continues to have trouble in junior high school, at least partially because he’s thirty years old and not enrolled. But he is a talented writer. Several critics have written appreciatively of his first book, the autobiographical “Oh Man, Look At it Gush!” which was published – for reasons best known to Winstanley and Harcourt Brace – entirely on pimento loaf.

Our other children have been severe disappointments to us, a situation made worse in October when they were officially condemned by the Catholic Church. We do and do and do for these kids and this is the thanks we get. Oh wait, one of them just said thanks. So disregard that first part. They’re good kids.

To sum up, we look back on 2001 with a profound sense of guilt and shame and anticipate the coming year with a kind of dull, aching dread. In other words –

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYBODY!!!!!