Happy Christmas all!

I hope this season finds you sipping tea with beloved friends and family! Today we’ve got leftovers on the table from Christmas Day’s feasting. The kids are sledding outside, and the sunlight is pouring in.

I’m hoping for a bath later, next to the woodstove, but for now, I’m planning my 2020.

Word of the Year

Do you pick a ‘word of the year”? I love this trend. I pick a word that sums up my focus for the next year and try to orient all my goals and resolutions around it.

Unfortunately, I also tend to forget my goals, and even my word, by mid-year. I actually had to flip back to the beginning of my bullet journal this week to remember which word I’d picked for 2019. Obviously, I missed the boat this year.

Looking back, there are a lot of things I wish I’d done differently in the past 12-24 months. A lot of missed opportunities and frustrated intentions. But the best thing about failing to enact change in the past, is that there’s always a new year to start over again!

This year, full of optimism, my word of the year is Domesticity.

Yes: home, family, homestead, simplicity, structure, and all those little, daily tasks that make a home sacred.

I’m focusing wholeheartedly on my little woodland nest. I want to nurture it and watch it thrive. Slowly, I’m hoping 2020 helps me become a domestic goddess – or, better yet, that eventual patron saint of hearth and home.

All the Little Goals

There’s a lot that goes into building a word of the year intention. Domesticity is a pretty wide goal. So I like to break up my word into bit-sized pieces.

This year, Domesticity has a lot of subheadings: sustainable, ritual, beautiful, homemade, consistent, organized, calm, quiet, gentle, and – of course – holy.

So, I’m retaining my favorite Scripture verse as inspiration for this coming year:

Wisdom has built her house; she has set up its seven pillars.
She has prepared her meat and mingled her wine;
she has also set her table. She has sent her maids to invite
to the tower, and to the walls of the city:
“Whososever is a little one, let him come to me. And to the unwise
she said: “Come eat my bread, and drink the wine which I have mingled
for you. Forsake childishness, and live, and walk by the ways of prudence.” (proverbs 9:1-6)

I’m praying with this proverb in the mornings and journaling through it in the evenings. And I’m entrusting my year to St. Grwst the hermit, whose quiet, forgotten life in eternity is such a joy to me. I want to continually remind myself of the hidden life of domesticity through the very different, but still hidden, life of Grwst.

In the Quotidian

To help me live out this new word, I’m focusing of developing discipline and “forsaking childishness”. So, I’ll be started an edited version of 75 Hard on January first. I’ll be structuring my days with more intention, and working on cultivating gentleness in my spirit.

I’ll talk more about each of my little ways of pursing domesticity later, right now, I’m spending a quiet day with St. Stephen and my lovely, little family.

What about You?

Do you have a word for the year? Or any goals and intentions you’d like to share? And please, give me some advice for sticking to my resolutions!