Anne, I just love your “counter” to the annual Christmas letter….Holiday letters that are all “upbeat and glossy” without any of the real issues and downside to them read like plastic!

Thanks, Joyce….perhaps we should start a NTXRR movement from Winter Solstice 2010! Anne

The last of this year’s Jupiter-Neptune conjunctions at the solstice can be felt very well I think in your Not the Xmas Round Robin piece. It has been a Jupiter-
Neptune year for us all in many ways, in both its good and bad forms.

Thanks Paul – always good to have the astrological angle! Anne

what a heartwarming comment to receive at this deep time of Northern darkness. But without darkness we could never know what light was…..blessings and greetings to you, too. Anne x

As you say so well in this post. It is sometimes in finding how vulnerable we are that we first begin to realise how precious life, the people we love and each day is.

Seems that in learning to live as fully as you could in each day, you have received a gift of being conscious of the wonderful small miracles that are around us all the time if only we take the time to ‘see’ them.

I have found that dark and difficult times seem to have the silver lining of shaking us out of ‘automatic’ mode and making us more fully aware of life instead of coasting on autopilot.

Lovely post, thanks for the reminder about ‘tending joy’.

Seasons greeting to you and very best wishes for the year ahead.

Susannah x

(By the way, that is a really nice photo of you and Ian.)