History of The Scallion, Part 2

When last we met, it was 1999. We had just finished our first holiday letter. It was boring and time-consuming. And yet ...

... the critics loved it. Of course, the critics were our friends and family, so what else were they going to say?

At any rate, we needed to top the previous year's letter, but how? We spent the first half of the year ... not doing anything. (See "Holiday Letter 1999.") And we did a few things in the last half of the year, but not enough to fill up a newsletter. So we just added a bunch of filler and sent it off.

What's interesting about this letter (and all of the letters, really), is what I remember while I'm rereading them to write these blog entries.

For example, in this letter, I reference Maermal, the patron saint of patience. I cringe at the reference now because it seems so contrived. But it also reminds me how new the Internet was even in 2000. People were really just starting to use Google, and I remember being so impressed by how quickly it returned results that I mentioned how it only took me 0.69 seconds to find that information. I wondered how long it would take to find the same information today, so I Googled "patron saint of patience." This time, my results were returned in 0.21 seconds. So impressive! Except for one thing. This time, Google said the patron saint of patience was St. Monica. I guess Google and I have gotten better with age.

I also use the phrase "plucky comic relief." This tells me that this letter was written sometime shortly after the movie Galaxy Quest came out, which uses that same phrase.

All in all, I'm not sure this is a better letter than the first one, but I do like the way it ends. So without further ado:

2000 Holiday Letter

See you next time!