Christmas, Life

We Wish You a Merry Christmas

A holiday newsletter

Dear friends,

My family and I wish you happy holidays!

I sent out a holiday newsletter with my cards this year, and I thought I’d share a “virtual” version of it with you with a few photos of our adventures throughout the year.

The kitty in the card is Freyja, caught in the act of absconding ornaments. Uma, Emerson, Bisou and Freyja get so excited when the tree, with its fluffy tree skirt, appears each year. They love to sit underneath it, look at the lights, and steal the ornaments. After enough times of rescuing glass balls being batted across the living room floor, we’ve learned to place those fragile ones a bit higher up. But, as you can see, Freyja is quite the tree climber.

We’ve had a good year, despite all of the COVID ups and downs. We had a couple of lovely (part work/part pleasure) trips to Maui and Hawaii in the spring. While we were there, we had the good fortune to be able to see mother and baby Humpback whales before they began their migration to Alaska. The little ones were learning to “breach” — to jump out of the water to strengthen their muscles for the long swim ahead.

Then, in June, we enjoyed a summer solstice trip to Alaska. We went out on a 32-person catamaran for a week, cruising the Inside Passage.

Before we left, we watched the National Geographic Secrets of the Whales series to learn more about the Humpbacks. They use a technique called “bubble-net feeding” for hunting krill. The female Humpbacks of Alaska are the only whales known to use this cooperative method. They surround a school of krill and then the matriarch begins to blow bubbles while descending in a circle. The other, younger, females follow her. When the krill are completely encased in a “net” of bubbles, the whales “fluke” — emerge to the surface and flip their tails to propel them into a dive — before swimming through the school of krill to feast.

To see this in person was a dream of ours. And we were delighted to witness it over-and-over again on our trip! Being on a small boat like that, with a captain who knows the behaviors of the local whales, is the way to see Alaska, in our opinion. The captain lowered a microphone into the water one evening while we were watching the whales and recorded their vocalizations. Listening to it later brought tears to our eyes.

We bookended the Alaska trip with a few days in Juneau and Sitka and we visited several small villages and wild places along the way, including the Tlingit Island of Kake, where we viewed petroglyphs strewn across the rocky shore, and the Norwegian village of Petersburg.

Being of Norwegian descent ourselves, we could easily envision being the ones who didn’t stop in Minnesota (like our relatives did), but rather just kept going until we’d reached the wilds of Alaska. Alaska and Norway really do look a lot alike.

We also visited the La Conte Glacier on an icy-cold day. We’d always heard that the icebergs glowed blue when it was overcast, but we had never imagined that they would actually “fluoresce.” Compact ice, as in a glacier, has very few air bubbles and it absorbs red light and scatters the blue light. When the icebergs tip over, as they often do, you are seeing the densest — and, hence, the bluest — part of the ice.

We also made several trips to Louisiana to visit Alton’s family. They prepared a crawfish boil feast for us while we were there in the spring, and we had a really nice visit with Alton’s 93-year-old mother. We were so glad that we made the trip because we lost the Burkhalter matriarch in November. She went peacefully. And she lived on her own until the very end.

My sister, Katherine, and I also took a trip to Minnesota to visit our mother. While we were there, we saw the Van Gogh Immersive Exhibit. I highly recommend it.

Katherine and I also did an astrophotography workshop At Mount Ranier this summer. We learned so much about photographing the stars and we caught this early morning glimpse of Mount Ranier.

After Mount Ranier, we did a “girl’s weekend” — Katherine, my best friend, Rebecca and me — at Bandon Beach, Oregon, which is, truly, a magical spot.

We went to Bend, Oregon, for my birthday, in October and did some kayaking and hiking.

We’ve both been bike riding a lot this year. Alton has a group of amazing friends with whom he has been riding several mornings a week for years and years. We also bought pedal-assist e-mountain bikes this spring and have been venturing out further together and have been able to tackle some really tough rides with that little extra “boost.” There are a couple of hills that I have never been able to conquer before and I have been able to work on the technique to get up them now that I have just that little extra bit of power.

I’ve been very actively writing this year. I stopped teaching yoga last year when the pandemic hit and have fully made the shift to full-time writing and photography. I’ve started selling a few photos here and there and have photographed a couple of events for friends recently.

Most of my work can be found, here, in various publications on medium.com, but I also had a couple of poems included in the Scribe anthology by Thomas Gaudex, The Embrace of Dawn, and also in a “virtual” anthology put together by the folks at Literary Impulse, Hiraeth (Somsubhra Banerjee and Priyanka Srivastava). I was also asked to participate in the poetry month for Our Human Family, and that poem was featured in an exhibit in Spain. I’m currently working on a book of my poetry, essays, and photography. I also started my own little publication to showcase some of my favorite poems, essays and photographs: Butterfly Dreams.

My step-daughter, her husband and our two-year-old granddaughter who is the cutest little thing ever, and their dog, Brutus are thriving. My step-daughter is very into crafting and put together the cutest birthday party this November. My other step-daughter and our grandson live locally. We just watched our second-grade grandson’s “virtual” Christmas performance, and he can sing “Silent Night” entirely in sign language. His soccer team made the play-offs, and he received a very large trophy.

Life has been busy and beautiful, and we are looking forward to the year ahead. It feels like good things are coming. If all goes as planned, we have a trip to Iceland coming up in April.

We send you our love and our best wishes for the new year.

Love,

Erika, Alton, Bisou, Freyja, Emerson, Uma and Mr. Squirrel

I particularly would like to wish the “Week in Photos” group Happy Holidays. I so enjoy following you and your lives throughout the year:

Dennett /Anne Bonfert /Eileen Vorbach /Lisa Bolin /Tracy Aston /David Wade Chambers/ Mia Verita /Kim Zuch /Barbara Radisavljevic /LensAfield /Barbara Dalton /Sasha Meyer /Susan Alison /Diana Lotti /Barbara Dalton /K. Barrett /June Nguyen /Juan O. Aguilera /Ellie Jacobson /Shruthi Sundaram/ Pene Hodge /Tracy Aston/ Sandra Barrett and more… (if I’ve failed to mention your name, please let me know so that I can add it in future weeks).

And also, some of my other favorite writers and readers: Rebecca Romanelli, James Knight James Finn Anne Bonfert Tre L. Loadholt Randy Shingler Randy Runtsch James Hacker Jack Herlocker Nalini MacNab Ann Litts Sylvia Wohlfarth Sylvia Clare MSc. Psychol Pablo Pereyra David Rudder Thomas Plummer Connie Song Caroline Mellor Carolyn Riker Pockett Dessert John O'Neill Louise Peacock and many others (I know I’ve forgotten a few and I apologize).

Erika Burkhalter is a yogi, neurophilosopher, cat-mom, photographer, and lover of travel and nature, spreading her love and amazement for Mother Earth’s glories, one photo, poem or story at a time. (MS Neuropsychology, MA Yoga Studies).

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Photos and story ©Erika Burkhalter. All rights reserved.