It’s been another watershed year on McCormick Street, marked by several outbursts of bloody violence, long stretches of tedium, and an incessant weeping that seems to be coming from the pipes that criss-cross our entire house, remnants of our admittedly excessive “monkey bar” period. For those of our friends who remember how puzzled we were by finding large, buttery footprints all over the ceiling of our anteroom, month after month, you’ll be relieved to learn that the mystery has been solved – it was a neighbor.

So let’s get to the highlights of the past year: Claire’s artwork has moved in an exciting new direction, apparently without her knowledge or effort. Dissatisfied with conventional materials such as clay, wood and stem cells, she has begun producing enormous, politically provocative sculptures fashioned entirely out of yeast. Oddly, though she is now an acknowledged master of the medium and has won several prestigious art awards, she continues to crap out on every baking contest she enters.

Frank has been at work on several new books, including “I Have Often Killed on This Street Before: Stalking Rodgers and Hammerstein” and “There Ain’t Room in These Pants For Both Of Us: A Memoir.” During the summer, his hijinks caused him to violate the space-time continuum and he had to relive the first season of “Car 54 Where Are You?” again and again and again until he nearly went mad from prolonged exposure to Joe E. Ross.

Frank has also been studying genealogy, inspired by his mother’s constant denial that she knows who he is or where he came from. He has learned, for instance, that his great grandparents were actors who met during a touring stage production of “The Secret Sin of Madame Shirley Jean and the Afghan She Knitted in Her Spare Time, If Any.” When the production went horribly wrong and all of the cast members were murdered by cretinous South Dakotans in the audience, Frank’s great grandparents saved themselves by hiding under a prop tumbrel. There they fell in love. Sadly, however, they both soon died of natural causes,  never having borne any children.

We have had to seek therapy for our oldest son Dolores, who still exhibits irrational rage directed at anyone he sees wearing jodhpurs. On the plus side, he won the coveted Award of Redundancy Prize for his vivid diorama depicting the fire that destroyed the nation’s first Pic ‘n’ Save in 1964. For this, he received a medal, a certificate of something approaching merit, and second degree burns.

The twins, Margaret and Margaret II: This Time It’s Personal, also caused shock waves in their school with their science project “Shock Waves and How They Affect Schools.”  Known for their cutting edge fashion sense, the twins were suspended and eventually arrested and executed for wearing culottes made of living badgers.

Our youngest, Dr. Dancer the Resplendent – we have to stop letting our kids name themselves – has had a similarly tumultuous time in pre-school. He was an acknowledged ringleader in what the press came to call the Pant Mustard Revolt and has baffled his doctors by subsisting entirely on fluffer-nutters and snuff.   Still, he wears a pith helmet with more panache than most two year-olds and we were thrilled when he recently spoke his very first words: “I long to bathe in the blood of the innocent! You are doomed! Doomed!” He’s a big boy. Yes he is! What a big boy!

Plenty more happened this year, from our ill-advised First Annual Blood Pudding Expo to that faux pas when Claire invited the boss over to dinner and, thinking she was offering him an aperitif, accidentally poured four gallons of battery acid over his head. But time, and gag orders, forbid us from going into any more detail. Suffice it to say that we hope your family has had a similarly eventful year and that the authorities will be able to prove nothing.

HAPPY HOLIDAYS, EVERYBODY!!!!!