Merry Christmas from the Cheneys

Writing to wish you and yours a very merry Christmas from the Cheneys. Lynne here, taking a moment during this busy season to count our blessings, praise our good fortune to be born in the greatest land in human history and reconnect with a carefully vetted and rigorously screened list of family and friends.

The state of our family is strong. Try as he might, the good Lord cannot kill Dick Cheney. The unquestioned heart of our family grows more vigorous every day. Now well into his second year post-transplant, he has resumed his full hunting schedule, decimating bevy after bevy of quail in the winter, drowning beavers in the spring. This Thanksgiving, he also restored the tradition of hunting, humiliating and harvesting the turkey for our holiday feast.

Family, of course, is the center of our lives, and we mark our days by how often we can be together. The vice president gave Samuel David Cheney, Mary’s boy, his first drone last Christmas. We try not to think too much about the genetics of two ladies having a baby together, but one thing we’re sure of is that Sammy is 100 percent Cheney. January was filled with fun as we saw how quickly Sammy taught himself to fly it. Soon he had extensive dossiers on all of us.

The highlight of February was the fabulous Valentine’s Day party Mary threw for the whole family. It was too bad that Liz couldn’t come, but she expressed her regrets in such a compassionate way. She sent a beautiful wreath of pink and white roses adorned with two little lovebirds holding a velvet ribbon inscribed with the words “Trying Not to Judge.”

Dick and I spent a lovely summer in our country home out on the Eastern Shore of Maryland, practically next door to Donald Rumsfeld, or Uncle Rummy, as the grandchildren like to call him. Truly, he is like a member of our family. All the children have learned so much from their summers with Don. Liz’s girls are great at hand-to-hand combat and wilderness survival, and her boys are wonderful marksmen, having studied with the best to improve their missile-guidance skills. You could parachute Liz’s kids into any remote, undisclosed location and they’d have a coup up and running in no time. This July 4, Uncle Rummy got the Air Force to close off the airspace for five miles around our little slice of the Atlantic coastline. What fun he and Dick had with the grandkids. After sunset, the grounds crew launched some old IEDs into the air like skeet, and everyone took aim. Much better than fireworks, as far as this grandmother is concerned.

Of course at our age, no year can go by without some loss. We had to drop former Sen. Alan Simpson and sitting Sen. Mike Enzi, for example, from our Christmas letter list. Honestly, they brought that on themselves. After the shameful things Alan said about Lynne in that newspaper ad, and when Mike didn’t just drop out of the race as soon as Liz decided it was her turn to be senator, we decided our feelings about these two are much stronger than we can convey in a public forum such as this. We are sending each of them autographed footballs, which we suggest they open very slowly to limit collateral damage.

Let me close by conveying my family’s best wishes to you and yours for secure communications, private accommodations and complete deniability in the months to come. We hope to see you at a time and place of our choosing in the New Year.