OREM           Monday, December 27, 6-9 pm           Tenth Annual FiddleSticks Boxing Day Party           The Davis House           647 North 1280 East, Orem

Since our arrival in Utah so many years ago, we have welcomed our friends and fans to our home in Orem for a concert and party the day after Christmas: Boxing Day.  (Since official boxing day (the 26th) is Sunday, we’re delaying the party a day!)  Bring potluck snacks (leftover Christmas fare is perfect), bring your instrument to join in if you want, and bring your good cheer.  For questions or info, please call 801 221 1108.  Directions to the party: http://members.tripod.com/timpanogos/timpanogos/oremtext.html

SALT LAKE/MIDVALE Tuesday, December 28 -  7:00 pm The Circuit Theater 7711 South 700 West Midvale

Ted and Sandy Shupe have moved their renowned performance theater to Midvale.  It’s in a cool artsy building in Historic Midvale.  Great acoustics, professional sound system, and a chance for our Salt Lake valley friends to see us close by.  Admission is just $5 each (at the door), or $15 for a family.  And we’ll give you a $5 discount on CDs purchased that night, so it’s like getting in free!

(CORRECTED DIRECTIONS: 700 West is just west of the I-15 freeway, so it’s easy to find: exit 7200 South and go south on 700 West, or exit 90th south and go north on 700 West.   You can’t miss it!  But you can call 688-2224 if you get lost or for more information.)

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DAVIS FAMILY NEWSLETTER Greetings to friends and family!                 It’s time for our annual holiday missive, in which we exaggerate our achievements and entirely omit our disappointments. But who wants to hear about threatened arrest warrants, high cholesterol levels, bindweed and thistle infestations, or the incontinence of aging cats in a Christmas letter?? So, here’s the good parts version of our 2004 family newsletter!

Highlights: New Baby “Camilla” ; New CD “Return to Nauvoo”; and New Frequent Flyer record.  Read on!

After we all got over our pneumonia last January (oh wait, we weren’t going to talk about that!) we decided that life’s too short to stay in one place. Our travels started in March when Andi and Xan (then about 18 months old) went with Mark for his annual BYU arbitration competition in Vienna. (Since this is the good parts letter, we’ll resist complaining how the BYU team’s success was greeted by a cancellation of the program and diversion of their funds to other projects...arrrhh!) We continued on to Berlin and Braunschweig to visit Grandma Betty, who was energetically chasing trams and charming stoic Germans as a Mormon missionary.

Then, just before school ended Katie, Liz and Mark loaded up instruments and CD boxes and flew to Japan where Becca and Matt had been living and working as English teachers. We called it a FiddleSticks World Tour and played several concerts around Tokyo and Nagoya. Between performances we got a fun insider’s view of Japan, staying in accommodations varying from a 19th century traditional farmhouse in Nagano to the U.S. Consul General’s residence in Nagoya to an old style Ryokan hotel in Tokyo. We also enjoyed sampling the extremes of local cuisine, from formal Geisha-served sukiyaki to assembly-line sushi to near-revolting “natto” -- fermented bean slime.

Liz then undertook a solo service project in Africa: she accompanied the 3- and 6-year-old children of our good friend Barbara (who is unjustly imprisoned on trumped up charges) to stay with their Grandma in Ghana. Then in August it was time for Katie to move to France for her semester abroad in the town of Besançon. Finally Mark noticed our family still hadn’t visited one major landmass in the year, and so in October he ran off to Argentina for a couple of weeks’ work with the friendly honey exporters.

Mark got back home just in time to welcome our farthest traveler this year -- our new Baby Camilla Sabine, who must have flown all the way from heaven, she’s such an angel. She was born on November 4th and is a real sweetheart -- calm and contended, and very much the center of attention. Big brother Xanny, who just celebrated his second birthday a couple of weeks before Baby Millie was born, adores her quite fiercely -- when he can be distracted from his real loves: trains, balls, and especially letters. (Brag alert:) Before his birthday he learned all the letters and numbers and colors and shapes. Which makes him an annoyance during Uno games, since he’ll wriggle onto your lap, take a look at your hand, and then innocently  announce to everyone: “yellow seven, blue five, red eight...!!”

Liz Speaking:

Happy Holidays to all our family friends around the globe. I hope this end of year season is going well for you all. I’ve enjoyed my relaxing senior year after the stress and excitement of a crazy summer in which I was home for a total of three weeks (non-consecutively). Days before school ended, and Days after releasing our FiddleSticks Hymn CD, (that I got to produce) we headed off for our family trip/ performance tour to Japan, where Becca and Matt were living. On the way home, we spent a few days in Washington and Oregon to do a bunch more concerts.

Two days after arriving home, Katie and I took the road trip to the Telluride Bluegrass festival. We were blown away with the quality and the quantity of great Musicians, Beer and Weed (though I’m proud that I cannot personally attest to the quality of the latter two). We got home just in time to do a few concerts before I left for an improv workshop in Boston at Berklee College of Music. I also got to meet up with some friends in the area. It was my first time going solo and I loved it!

Then for the final trip of the summer, I headed off (solo again) to Washington DC to pick up Kendra (6) and Michael (3) Blackwell to take them to their grandma in Ghana (their mother is a great friend and was my childhood nanny/ sister). To make a long story short, Ghana Airlines shut down, so I spent a week with Duc and some friends of the family living in the DC area. After a lot of negotiating on my dad’s part, I was able to get three one-way tickets and we headed out. Ghana is AMAZING! I don’t know how to describe it. The kids did really well adjusting and their relatives are great. I’ve never eaten such great crazy food, I’ve never seen such wonderful markets, I’ve never met such interesting people, I could go on! Anyway it was great.

In fact, the only problem was getting home. As the first day of school began to draw near, I still couldn’t find a ticket home. Finally I managed to find a first class ticket to Ethiopia through Cameroon (9 hours in the wrong direction), but when I got there, they didn’t have me booked on the connecting flight, so I fought it out– with the help of other passengers–  and spent the night in a first class hotel in the middle of the shantytowns of Addis Ababa. Luckily my dad didn’t go crazy after spending hours calling airlines, hotels, etc. all over Africa trying to find out if I was alive.

I finally made it home via Italy, with a stop in New Jersey to visit Andi’s sister, Marcia. Then I came home and got to school at 6:45 the next morning for a Student Council meeting. So, by comparison, school hasn’t been too eventful. My ultimate Frisbee team won the championship.  I go rock climbing a lot. I have cool friends. Oh, yeah... I play the cello a lot, too.             Oh, P.S. I’m in the presidency of my school’s Operation Smile club. This organization takes doctors around the world to correct cleft lips and cleft pallets. So, if you would like to give a kid the gift of a smile for Christmas, send donations to my address, and I promise I’ll forward the donations directly to service missions around the world.  

        P.P.S. Xan and Millie are SO cute! All I ever do is play with them!     Ok. I’m done. Til next year. Happy Holidays from Liz!

Liz mentioned our new FiddleSticks Hymn CD.  We got the idea when we played a week-long concert series in Nauvoo, and heard a bunch of old-time hymns from the early Mormon period there.  We really had fun there – we felt an almost mystical connection to the place and really enjoyed it – maybe because we have lots of ancestors who were original settlers of Nauvoo and helped build the temple, which has now been restored.  Anyway, we arranged and recorded a bunch of old style hymns, and we kind of like how it turned out.  It’s called “Return to Nauvoo.”  You can hear the music online at cdbaby.com/cd/fiddlesticks5.

Hey all, it’s Katie.  I’m sitting in a smelly hot computer lab in Besançon, France as I type up my “Christmas letter paragraph.”  Yep, I’m in France.   But let me start before that.  At the beginning of the year I was at Utah State University, way up north in Logan, being cold and studying mostly science classes for my Conservation and Restoration Ecology major (with minors in geology and French).  Then we had a wonderful summer which included a Japan trip and lots of musical adventures.  I played fiddle for the Hale Center Theater’s production of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.  My friend Ben and I were the “live orchestra pit,” à la bluegrass, that was great fun.  So after that I had about a month to gather  my  things,  get a  French student visa and fly out here.  I first was on the northwest coast in Normandy for a month of intense language study, and then regular classes started at the Université de Franche-Comté in the northeast border, not far from Geneva, where I’ve gone for day trips a few times – as well as Paris, Lyon, Nice, Dijon...  I am on the high carb diet here, and I’m not complaining.  Croissants, tartes, breads, pastries...yummm.  But I haven’t spent all my time eating, I did a bit of studying, too.  And I made some fabulous friends.  I come home the 19th of December, and I’m very ready to be home.  Well, I wish you all a happy holiday season.  Love Katie!!

Hi From Becca!           This year has been all about moving. Last December we graduated from BYU (Becca even survived a somewhat harrowing Student Teaching experience) we moved to Japan (decorated a rosemary plant with earrings, put all of our favorite stuff under our “tree” and it was Christmas!) and spent six months kind of teaching and mostly lolling about in the hot baths and glutting ourselves on yummy food. We took side trips to Korea and Okinawa, and toured with family in June, thanks to the wonderful kindness of the Miyakawas, the Sakurais, the Obas, the Uchidas, the Nodes, and Joe. Thank you and we love you! Then we returned to Utah to play with baby Xanny and co and pack our junk, then we drove it across Nevada to Albany, CA.

We took a brief detour before school started and went with Matt’s family to South Carolina to experience southern hospitality and hurricane warnings. Matt is an excellent graduate student at UC Berkeley, where he never fails to impress professors and professionals with his great attitude and skills in Grassland Ecology. We love Albany, and neighboring Berkeley. Becca is working for a wonderful company doing bookkeeping, and tutoring Japanese kids in English. We both are really enjoying the friendly Berkeley ward, Becca conducting the choir and Matt conducting genealogical research.

Thank you all for your friendship. We hope you have a prosperous, safe, and cozy year!  Love, Becca and Matt

Andi gets the last word...

            Of course I get the last word. Now that you’ve read all the dizzy list of Davis achievements let me fill you in on the number one most unbelievable accomplishment of the year. It isn’t the visits to six of the world’s seven continents, our new CD, the scholarships and leaps through higher education or even the miracle of a new life straight from our Heavenly Father. No, the real event of 2004 was Mark and Andi actually agreeing on a name for the baby. Talk about the war to end all wars. Let’s just say she was known during her nine months of gestation as “Heartburn Helga” and nearly ended up as “Baby Zega”. Two hundred seventy-three days of pregnancy to think about what to name our baby girl and it was only in the last 15 minutes of labor that something finally clicked. Camilla Sabine. We chose Camilla for the graceful power of Camilla Kimball. Sabine came from the mystic creativity of Nick Bantock’s Griffin and Sabine books.      --  Merry Christmas, Love Andi

Best wishes and much love from us Davises to you all!