Christmas 2012			One small Child in a land of a thousand
	  			One small dream in a people of might
				One small hand reaching out to the starlight
				One small Savior of Life

Dear friends and family,

Merry Christmas!  I'm thankful to be healthy this Christmas and able
to get my Christmas greetings out to you on time -- unlike last year
when I had the flu and didn't send anything until Easter!

It's been a musical Christmas season for me.  The lines above are from
a solo I sang with guitar at church today.  Earlier this month while
the other grownups were decorating the tree at church, I helped
entertain the kids downstairs with some Christmas songs.  This coming
Sunday we are having an all-request carol sing as part of the service,
and I'll be taking some of the load off our organist by playing guitar
on the ones I know.  Then on New Year's Eve, none of our organists
will be able to be there, so I'll be leading all the hymns on guitar.

As usual, I spent a week during the summer helping run our northern
Calfornia WELS Bible camp, serving as camp treasurer and music leader.
Twice in the remaining summer months I led the singing with guitar in
an outdoor worship service for one of our congregations, held in
connection with their church picnic -- once in Livermore and once at
my home church in Belmont.

Work is still going well.  Now that our company (VMware) has over
10,000 employees, things are a lot different than when I joined as
approximately employee #150 in 2001.  Our products are still selling
well and there are still interesting technical challenges for me to
work on each day.

It has been fun to be a fan and season ticket holder for Stanford
football and women's basketball.  The football team won the Pac-12,
upsetting many highly ranked teams along the way, and will be playing
Wisconsin in the Rose Bowl game on January 1.  Women's basketball is
currently ranked #1 in the country, having upset the defending
champions from Baylor last month.  This Saturday I'll be in the stands
as they play the #2 ranked UConn Huskies in Stanford's Maples
Pavilion, which is less than a 2 mile walk (or bike ride) from my
house.  You can catch the game on ESPNU.

In my genealogy hobby, I've nearly run out of things to work on, but I
did have one nice breakthrough this year.  I was stuck trying to
figure out exactly where in Germany my great-grandfather Wilhelm
Sonnemann came from, so I finally wrote to a German genealogist who
specializes in the general area that I knew he was from, giving him
all the information that I had about the family.  Using resources I
didn't know about or didn't have access to, he was able to find
records of the Sonnemann family going all the way back to my 5th great
grandfather, who was baptized 24 Mar 1700 in Willensen.  My sister
Mary and I are talking about making a trip to Germany in summer 2013
and visiting some of our ancestral villages, now that we know where so
many of them are.

In news of my living family, my grandnephew Sasha was married in
Minneapolis just after Thanksgiving.  Most of the family was able to
gather there for Thanksgiving dinner and to attend the wedding.  It
was great to see them all again!

Christmas Blessings to all in Jesus Christ,

Tim Mann