...and to all a good night!

Ahhh.  It is over and it is beginning. 

What a whirlwind this short Advent has been this year.  I am so grateful you were able to join in the journey, whenever it is that you find yourself reading this final entry for 2012 and all of the posts before it. 

The kids are in bed, the gifts are wrapped...tomorrow is our "around the town" family tour.  Distant family members are home, close family members are ready.  We've celebrated some and we'll celebrate some more.

I hope the blog helped you slow down and remember.  Hopefully, a short pause each day was either an antidote to "Holiday super cheer: yay!" or a way to consider the year behind and the year ahead.  For me, it has also been a great time of spiritual renewal.

To all of you who contributed, or commented, or sent notes or ideas, I thank you. 

I want to end with a flourish, a bang, a zoom...but I think ending with this short excerpt from a favorite book of mine is appropriate.

Here's what I knew at the beginning of Advent, and what I know now:  I fail every day at things, but I also succeed.  And I will never know why the failures loom before me like giant floats in the Macy's Day parade and the successes seem to shine brightly then fly away.  But I can only be myself -- and that's all any of us really need to be anyway.  The blog helps bring me back to that.  And I hope the same for you too. 

“Real isn't how you are made,' said the Skin Horse. 'It's a thing that happens to you. When a child loves you for a long, long time, not just to play with, but REALLY loves you, then you become Real.'

'Does it hurt?' asked the Rabbit.

'Sometimes,' said the Skin Horse, for he was always truthful. 'When you are Real you don't mind being hurt.'

'Does it happen all at once, like being wound up,' he asked, 'or bit by bit?'

'It doesn't happen all at once,' said the Skin Horse. 'You become. It takes a long time. That's why it doesn't happen often to people who break easily, or have sharp edges, or who have to be carefully kept. Generally, by the time you are Real, most of your hair has been loved off, and your eyes drop out and you get loose in the joints and very shabby. But these things don't matter at all, because once you are Real you can't be ugly, except to people who don't understand.”
― Margery Williams, The Velveteen Rabbit


Merry Christmas and Happy New Year!

My love to you all.

-Amy