12/22/2025
This holiday season feels different.
The lights still go up, the food still gets made, and the calendar still insists we celebrate—but five seats are quieter than they were a year ago.
We miss the voices, the stories we’ve already heard a hundred times, the little traditions only they remembered to keep going. Grief has a way of showing up uninvited, usually right when the coffee’s brewing or a song comes on that hits too close.
But love doesn’t leave when people do.
It settles in deeper.
So this season, we carry them with us—in the recipes, the jokes, the habits we didn’t realize we inherited. We remember them not just with sadness, but with gratitude for having had them at all.
