Hope and Joy

My friend Stephanie has a daughter called Joy and a dog called Hope. The two are rarely parted, so she can talk nonstop about her house being full of Hope and Joy, here come Hope and Joy, Joy bringing Hope, and so on.

Well, I'm doing well for hope and joy this week. The comment from Jon Kilpatrick on the last blog gave me a whole heartful and headful of joy, as well as the sense of amazement and 'how did that happen?' that always comes when people move into Mistmantle. Jon, will you e-mail me, please? I'll see about a New Year Message or something for your students.

And you know about Hope, my adorable little Hope that LYS made for me. Now that we're clearing away all the Christmas things he has moved upstairs to the shelves in my study where we he and I can see each other, and he has a squirrel and a frog for company. He's on a low shelf so he can't fall off and hurt himself. He is smiling happily up at the squirrel or the stars, depending on which way I turn him.

I've taken a break to write this - I'm halfway through taking the decorations off the tree, the old glass ornaments that were on my Dad's tree when he was a boy, the things he made for my children, the beaded decorations that I made, the things the kids made when they were small, and precious delicate crib scenes from Austria. They will be wrapped and stored away, ready to put on the tree in the new House of Stories next Christmas.

And it feels like the right time, time to pack everything away and take down the tree so that the dining table (on which most of my books have been written) can go back to its usual place. We're all getting back to work. It's time to make a proper start on the year. A year full of Joy and Hope.