Merry Christmas, Happy New Year, Etc.

[OTRhine at aol_com]

Howdy,

Today is a blustery, bright December day in Ohio.

We wanted to take a few moments to wish you all happy holidays. We returned 
home safely from our Christmas tour and have been reflecting on how much we 
enjoyed ourselves. Thanks to all of you who attended the shows and (heavens 
to Betsy) to those of you who came loaded down with treats: flowers, cookies, 
tiny drawings, heart-shaped waffles, banana bread, jewelry, birthday cake!, 
baskets of Swedish treats, bottles of wine and so on--you surprise and 
delight us with your kindnesses along the way. Thank you.

We'd like to especially thank Bill Mallonee for joining us on all these 
dates. And big thank you's of course to the Texans: Brian Standefer (cello) 
and Will Sayles (percussion) and to our tour manager from Windsor, Ontario: 
Mike Sponarski.

We'd also like to thank Kris Barberg for toting her cameras around and taping 
a fair bit of the proceedings. We'll be working on a DVD project with her in 
the coming year. We're anxious to see what she's come up with so far and we 
look forward to eventually hearing the stories of those of you who were 
interviewed. 

So we picked out a 9' Frazier Fir last night and began decorating. Today 
we're going to try to prune and trim the pine tree in our front yard and wrap 
it in strands of white lights. We feel sort of bad about trimming a tree in 
December, but our A&R man at Backporch owns a Christmas tree farm in 
Wisconsin, and he says it should be fine. Our particular pine rejects the 
classic cylindrical shape and grows wild and glorious in all directions. 

We're closing the Over the Rhine office for the holidays. If you ordered CD's 
etc from the website, everything has been shipped out Priority Mail. We'll 
take care of any additional orders after Christmas.

We are grateful to all of you. It's been a good year.

On a final note, if you live near us and would like to treat yourself to 
something luxurious this Christmas, we'd like to recommend the therapeutic 
massage of Sandie Brock. We've known Sandie for many years--she and her 
husband Owen were responsible for luring us to Cincinnati (Owen designs the 
CD booklets for Over the Rhine) and Sandie has pampered us for the last 
several years at our Cincinnati Christmas concerts. We think you'll 
appreciate her sweet spirit, and your body and soul will thank you. We'll get 
a link up on our homepage soon, but in the meanwhile:
http://www.equilibrium3.com

Well that's it for now. We'll be hunkered down for the first several months 
of next year trying to get some of these songs wrestled onto tape. We'll see 
you at the end of March.

Blessings and other good things your way,

Linford and Karin
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