Doesn’t the new year feel a little bit exciting to you?  It’s a great time to pretend that the last year has been put away and the new year will be all kinds of different–I’ll eat right this time and work out more and everything will be wonderful.

Right.  I get that it never works that way.  But every day, I have an opportunity to behave more kindly, to understand things just a little bit more, and to make better choices.

This morning, there was a beautiful, thick layer of frost over everything, and it made the whole world outside of our house (or what I could see) this pretty, sparkly wonderland.  I was a fan!  It made me think about the freshness of the new year, and I couldn’t imagine a better way to start the year than with natural sparkle.

If I’m tempted to take a picture of the trash cans because they’re so pretty, something miraculous is going on.  It happened.  (This picture is not of our trash cans, as I couldn’t capture the sparkle adequately this morning.)

Wait?  The new year doesn’t start until tomorrow?  Well, just go with it.  There will be frost tomorrow, and it will be sparkly.  And it will make me think about a fresh new year again.

And so with that, I say an official farewell to 2014.  I will try and fail to do things right in 2015, but there’s some beauty in trying and getting another chance.  I hope you enjoy the fresh year, too.