Our 2025 Christmas Letter
As I’ve written in the past, I continued my tradition of writing an annual family letter this year. Here’s a copy published for posterity.
December 2025
Dear friends & family,
How are you? Busy? Busy was certainly the story of our lives in 2025. We’re always “busy.”
- Busy with the daily grind of household chores, and the planned and unplanned maintenance that is inevitably necessary for our houses, cars and equipment.
- Busy with the weekly routine of church cleaning and lawn mowing.
- Busy listing and shipping items sold on eBay and Poshmark and Facebook Marketplace – we sold over 400 individual items this year. You can see our latest stock on our Parkerlings eBay shop.
- Busy with organizing new inventory associated with occasional storage unit or consignment auction wins — we cleared out half a dozen storage units this year.
- Busy with clearing out and managing Piepenbrink Estate items.
- Busy preparing soil, tending seedlings, weeding, harvesting and preserving hundreds of tomatoes and cucumbers, and various other bits of produce. Phil’s garden expanded a bit further into the yard again this year and he’s looking forward to finally getting a small greenhouse installed next year – maybe.
- Busy dismantling old metal motors and machines for their scrap value.
- Busy creating and editing monthly videos for our YouTube channel, @parkerlings. – we topped 500 subscribers in September, only 500 more to go before we might start making money from this endeavor. (Please subscribe to our channel if you haven’t already!)
- Busy organizing monthly meetings and events for our church senior group – we hosted a lovely one-man play in October called “An Evening with Martin Luther.” Click through if you’re curious to watch it for yourself.
- Busy with the occasional excavating job that Dad decides to take on; we are still the designated grave diggers for two local cemeteries, although those jobs were sporadic this year.
We’re busy, but there was plenty of time each day for our favorite online games, Monopoly GO and Fishdom, and there was plenty of time for almost daily games of Settlers of Catan. And plenty of time to watch hours of YouTube content. Sandy found time to be creative in her craft room and read a bunch of books that we found in a couple of the storage units that we cleared out. Saturday night worship was a weekly highlight, too.
We found time to go fishing once or twice during the spring, and to visit Annette and Andrew’s property out in Missouri a couple of times, and to visit the UK for Phil’s Dad’s 80th birthday in July.
It’s good to be busy, but not too busy to maintain our relationship with God. We can take the time to pray and meditate on the blessings that God has bestowed on us, even if consistent cash income remains elusive. We’re thankful that our savings are holding out and trust that God will continue to tide us over until our private retirement pensions become available (and that they, too, will be sufficient to maintain a frugal, but comfortable, lifestyle). As you close out your busy 2025, we pray that you, too, will be able to reflect and be grateful for the many blessings that God has given you, too, especially the blessing of faith in Him and His fulfilled promises in Jesus, your Savior, and mine.
Looking forward to an equally blessed and rewarding 2026; perhaps next year we’ll finally get to report on completion of some larger home projects (like a main floor kitchen) and introduction of chickens to our homestead.
Merry Christmas!
Phil & Sandy Parker and Victor Piepenbrink
