Monthly Archives: December 2025

A New Year!

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 The New Year is literally my favorite! I so love the start of a new year, all fresh and sparkly in my mind. I have been enjoying not only the holidays and Christmastide, but a feeling of energy and new beginnings in the quiet coziness. This is the beautiful blessing I often share on the New Year, from my home to yours:

May love and laughter light your days,
and warm your heart and home.
May good and faithful friends be yours,
wherever you may roam.
May peace and plenty bless your world
with joy that long endures.
May all life’s passing seasons
bring the best to you and yours.

-From an Old Irish Blessing, author unknown

My wishes for you in the New Year:

May this year be the one in which you are ENOUGH just the way you are.

May this year be the one in which you are content.

May this year be the one where you are loved as richly as you deserve.

May this year be one of bountiful and deep friendships, beautiful family memories, and love.

May this year be the year that you help someone else, the year of your generous spirit blossoming.

May this year be the one that is perfect for you and where you are in life and may you enjoy it abundantly!

I love the more introverted vibe of this season – nesting with blankets and hot drinks and inside fun, but still being able to go outside for a walk in the rain or bright sunshine with colder temperatures!    

January is actually one of my favorite months of the year. Suzanne Down had a beautiful little story in her most recent newsletter, and I found the public domain version of it here to share with you: https://etc.usf.edu/lit2go/165/buttercup-gold-and-other-stories/2902/the-little-new-year/. It would be a lovely one to tell with puppetry for your children but it is also worth a read if you have older children or are an empty nester to remember the spirit of Christmastide and new beginnings all around!

Here are some of the days we will be celebrating in January:

January 1 – New Year’s Day

January 6– The Feast of Epiphany and Epiphanytide that stretches until Lent begins on Wednesday, February 18 this year (and Easter is on Sunday, April 5th for those of you planning ahead!)

January 18 to January 25 Week of Prayer for Chrisian Unity

January 19– Martin Luther King, Jr Day – also celebrated January 15 and April 4 in The Episcopal Church

Janaury 18– The Feast Day of St. Peter

January 25 – The Feast Day of St. Paul

Rhythm is strength, and I have things in place for the house with outside the home work, farm work, and homeschooling our tenth grader. This is key to fitting in my priority of health and family plus work! I still work for two different companies providing physical therapy and lactation services plus have my own business so the days can vary, but I am learning to streamline more. I hope to eventually move into teaching at the college level and will streamline clinical work even more.

The farm is at only three horses right now that require care. We had six horses previously, two were boarders – one horse very sadly died, one horse went to his family home as they were building a barn, and one of our horses is being leased and is at our trainer’s farm down the road. We still have two beehives plus our indoor dogs and cats. We still have many renovation projects to go in the house (this year we are renovating our master bath), and landscaping and pasture pieces to fulfill, but slowly we are getting there. This house and property has been an incredible project. We were lucky to find this during the pandemic, but it has been a ton of work with literally not one thing from insulation, plumbing, water lines, heating, etc needing to be redone up through the pastures, barn, etc. It can be overwhelming at times, but then I remember how much I wished and prayed for this place and get my gratitude on again!

I usually pick a word of the year instead of making resolutions, and this year I chose the word “ROOTED.” Do you have a word of the year to bring you focus and clarity? My past words have included words such as radiant, abundant, vibrant, bold (2023) ,replenishment, and last year was commit  This year, I have really sat with a planner, a vision board, and a prayer board and just thought about how to bring pieces of “ROOTED” to life this year and what types of support I will need to make that happen.

These are a few of the things we are enjoying this month:

  • Daily outside time – when our children were small and we lived in neighborhoods, this was mainly in the form of a daily walk, and park time. Now it is mainly in the form of barn chores but I also am starting to walk again. I actually don’t generally mind the colder weather.
  • Puzzles and board games
  • Green smoothies and juicing
  • Making freezer meals
  • Exercising – I go to the gym, and generally do a combination of hot yoga, lifting weights, and Zumba.
  • Creating
  • Going out as a couple
  • Playing with our horses, dogs, and cats
  • Beekeeping
  • Indoor microgreens!

If you are looking for fun things to do with children, these are things we have enjoyed:  Cut out paper snowflakes, including really cool 3-D snowflakes; dip candles; roll candles; play board games or card games with your children;  draw, paint, model; whittle wood; make popcorn together; bake together; play in the snow – build snow forts; have snowball fights; snowshoe; downhill or cross country ski;  ice skate on a pond; read and tell stories; build forts inside; take a walk outside in the cold – look for animal tracks or berries or birds or all of the above; knit, crochet, cross stitch, finger knit, spin, sew; sing and make music together – learn some new songs; clean, scrub, dust, work around the house – rearrange furniture; go bowling or find an indoor swimming pool to swim in; write letters to family and friends; write stories together; snuggle on the coach with hot chocolate and marshmallows; cook for a neighbor; find a place of worship to attend and get involved; throw a party; clicker train your dog, cat, or other animal; take care of plants; start seeds indoors when it it is time

On the parenting and  homeschooling front, our oldest lives and works about an hour from us but comes to farm frequently because her horse is here. Our middle child is working towards her own business in the equine industry, and our youngest is a sophomore in high school. He is enjoying being in Sea Scouts. Homeschooling doesn’t look quite like it used to when I was homeschooling three children Monday through Friday, but we still have days of homeschooling in addition to several days of classes at a local hybrid high school.

THINGS TO LOVE THIS MONTH!

Things to love this month:

The January Book Box

Warming Meals

The other thing I am really enjoying is Hearth & Home for all things homemaking. I hope you enjoy it as much as I do: https://www.myhearthandhome.com/

I hope you are a member of The Child is the Curriculum for seasonal living, Waldorf homeschooling, Waldorf parenting, and support! It’s an amazing resource for those of you Waldorf homeschooling : https://www.thechildisthecurriculum.com/subscriptions/?register=1

Lastly, if you love a good book club I like to see what books they are reading here: https://everyday-reading.com/the-2026-everyday-reading-book-club-list/ I also like outdoor memoir oriented books,( have you seen the books on Rugged OutdoorsWomen on Instagram?) so I have some of those on my list for this year! Other things I am interested in is doing an art class or taking some music lessons again (I play flute). Those might be good spring, summer, and fall ideas! I hope you have some fun things planned just for you!

Looking forward to celebrating throughout the year with you and supporting you on your parenting and homeschooling journey! I would love to hear what is on your mind regarding the New Year!

Many blessings to you and Happy New Year!

Carrie

The Twelve Holy Nights

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Merry Christmas, and a blessed Christmastide to you! 

In times ago and for some today, Christmas was celebrated as a festival of twelve days and thirteen Holy Nights.  Christmas Eve is actually the first of the Holy Nights, with the first day of Christmastide being Christmas and then the Holy Nights extend until Twelfth Night on the eve of January fifth (anyone remember Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare?)  January 6 is of course Epiphany.

These beautiful and inward Holy Nights is one of my most personally fulfilling times of the whole year.  It is a very inward time, a time to dream and a time to plan.  I am using Raising Little Shoots’ wonderful Midwinter Resource for adults, and it is fantastic! You can find it here: https://raisinglittleshoots.com/the-year-of-light-a-gentle-winter-journey-with-god-from-midwinter-to-candlemas/

In general, I do a lot of reflecting and thinking about what I want to see in my family life during the next year and what I want to see in myself.   I try very hard to schedule nothing during this time, and so even though I have to work a few days during Christmastide, I like to have as much time as possible to just be.   With all of our children being ages sixteen to twenty four, this year has been a time of puzzles, reading, and being on the farm. The flu has hit my poor husband, but the rest of us are healthy and for that I am grateful. It’s a good time to rest!

Many Waldorf families mark this time by setting up a path of stars for the Three Kings to travel on to reach the infant Jesus.  Some families make an Advent-type calendar to mark these days.  Some families make a Weather Tree, and have fun guessing what the weather will be like each month of the new year based on the weather of each of the Twelve Days.

This is a great time to play card and board games with your family, to catch up with your family and friends, to grow more intimate with your spouse or partner as you plan and dream together. I love the ideas of couples planning their year ahead together with a big calendar!

One thing I love is to take stock of the past year and look ahead to the New Year.  Like most people, I am not very good at keeping resolutions.  So I normally choose a word of the year to help keep me focused and centered on my priority. I first heard of this practice from Sheila over at Sure As The World, many years ago. So many treasures over there!

This year, my word is ROOTED.  Each year I have done artistic representations of my word with sort of corresponding focus areas represented. One year I did concentric circles with the word of the year in the middle.  I have done trees with the word as the root and some of the focal areas as branches and I have done vision boards. Last year I did a vision board and transferred a line drawing of myself onto the vision board with all the different areas I wanted to think about around that.

This year, I am thinking particularly about my work outside of the home, and where I am headed. I am hopefully going to be able to get into teaching at the college level and streamline some of my clinical work, nd I am looking at PhD programs. I am not young anymore, but I don’t feel particularly daunted by it either. The second thing I am thinking about is my health, because as many of you know I faced a life -threatening challenge in 2023, so keeping physically healthy is a top priority! Lastly, my main goal is to keep making fun memories with the family. The older the kids have become, the more obsessed my husband and I are with them because they are so much fun and such cool people to hang out with! I will be dreaming and drawing and painting throughout Christmastide to see what comes to me in these areas.

For those of you just starting out thinking about Christmastide and the Holy Nights, maybe you would enjoy this introspective approach of using biography to understand yourself as you move into the New Year.  Here are areas of focus for each of the twelve days:

December 25th:  Think about your own birth:  the circumstances, your family, your own physical body as an infant and as a child.  Write down your impressions.  Pick three words that describe your physical body as an infant and child.  Were you frequently sick or robust?  Did you have any physical challenges?

December 26th:  Think about the Early Years, ages 0-7.  Did you feel loved and accepted and as if you belonged?  When you think back, what were you like then?  What composed your whole world?  Do you have an early impressions of nature and how that affected you?

December 27th:  Think about the years 7-14.  What were your habits, the things you did on a daily basis from what you did when you got up, what you did in the afternoons after school, what you did before you went to bed.  What did you do every week on certain days of the week?  How did that shape you?  Does it continue to impact you now?

December 28th:  Think about the years 14-21.  What were the things you loved, what was most important to you?  What did you dislike?  Are the things that were important then still important now or has that totally changed?

December 29th:  Think about the years 21-28 of your life.  What things do you see happening that were the complete hand of God, your destiny?  Relationships, people, births and deaths, things that changed your life and who you were forever?

December 30th:  Think about the years 28-35.   Can you draw yourself at this age and the things in your life at this point?  Did you have a significant experience at the age of 33 or so?

December 31st:  Think about the years  35 – 42 if you are there!  What was most important from this period to you? What do you imagine this to be like?

January 1st:  Think about the years 42-49 if you are there.  What do you have to bring outward into the world during this phase?  What is it you are passionate about?  What will you do with your passions this year?

January 2nd: Pick one of the seven year time periods that really speaks to you from your life.  Draw it.  Get together with a friend and draw those time periods together.  Explain your life during that time period to your friend.

January 3rd:  Think about yourself as a physical entity.  What do you need to do to nurture your physical body this year?  What would be helpful?  How could you make this happen?

January 4th: Think about yourself and the habits and rhythms you create for yourself. If you keep journals, look back through the past years.  What months are you tired?  What months do you feel most energized?  Are you an early or late riser?  What days of the week do you like best and feel most productive?  Are there any rhythms that you should be setting in place for you or your family members so that everyone is happier?  Is life simple or busy?  Do your rhythms support you, or deplete you?  What could you change to make this a simpler and more peaceful year?

January 5th:  Think about what you love.  Name those things.  Name passions you have in books, music, subjects, knowledge.  Are you nurturing those passions?  Are your interests changing?  Name one thing you would like to deepen your knowledge of this year.

January 6th:  How can you nurture your spiritual or your religious side? Do you have a religious community? Do you have any kind of community outside of the four walls of your home?  We were made to be in community with one another.  How will you nurture community this year?

Many blessings,
Carrie