Roses of Grace

Well. The year is officially over.  Today, it is January 2, 2023. It's the start of a new year, and since it's almost the 1-year anniversary of this blog, I figured I'd do a year in review. Maybe it'll become a tradition, maybe it won't—let me know what you think! So: What happened this year?  Looking Back at 2022 What happened? Blog stuff: I started Roses of Grace on January 20. (Almost a year ago—wow.) I started an email list in which I get to connect with you guys every week!  I wrote almost a hundred blog articles. This is article number 97. Writing stuff: I finished the first draft of my first ever novel! (It's the one I talk about in this post .) I participated in Nanowrimo and finished the first draft of my second novel! Life stuff: I spent the summer in Paraguay, learning Spanish and getting a taste of overseas missions. I hit emotional highs and lows, and my relationship with the Lord deepened through them. I made new friends! :) Favorite blog articl...

A few weeks ago, we put up our Christmas tree. It was only a few days after Thanksgiving, which is as it should be—though I'm sure that those of you who start the Christmas season before Thanksgiving are perfectly lovely people regardless. 😉 Anyway, we usually get a live tree from a local farm, and we decorated it with all the ornaments we had in the attic. Looking at the ornaments is one of my favorite things to do. We have such a wide variety of them that it's really entertaining to go through the boxes, and it brings back a lot of old memories—a ballet shoe picture frame ornament that I used to put hand-drawn "art" in, for instance, or the set of silver, pink, and green mushrooms with sparkles on the top.  I'm sure you have ornaments that bring back a lot of memories for you when you look at them, so you know what I'm talking about. And decorating our tree this year was a very interesting experience. It made me think a lot about the traditions around Chri...