Welcome, friends and family, to our Christmas 2008 newsletter. We hope you've had a happy, healthy, and enjoyable year. Hoping that you had a prosperous one as well is probably asking too much. No doubt your nest egg laid one during the recent Wall Street meltdown, just like ours and everyone else's. We've been checking our mailbox daily for a bailout check from the Feds, but so far all we've received are Christmas flyers, a few bridge magazines, and the usual collection of bills, bills, bills. The folks at Visa are annoyingly punctual.

Recently, the Board Of Directors of Stragsco Enterprises met to discuss the looming economic downturn. The CEO and CFO advocated, as usual, that we tighten our corporate belts and live within our means this holiday season. The three EVPs, equally as usual, countered with Christmas lists expensive enough to recapitalize Lehman Brothers. In fact, we discovered that we cannot even afford the shipping and handling costs for the components of the Chief Technology Officer's dream computer -- one that he plans to build himself (seriously!) and which is powerful enough to simulate the entire Big Bang down to the quark level on one half of the CPU, while allowing him to play World Of Warcraft on the other half while he waits.

This left us in the familiar year-end position of needing to figure out a way to reconcile our Accounts Receivable with our combined Accounts Payable and Accounts Spendable At Best Buy. After some discussion, we think we've hit upon a winning idea. Surely our friends and family are looking for a safe, sound, promising place to invest their money in these uncertain times. But the Dow Jones is now the Down Jones, and it is not without irony that S&P stands for "Standard & Poor". That's where we at Stragsco come riding to your rescue. When you can't trust the NASDAQ, turn to.........

What silliness do we have in store for you this year?