Merry Christmas

From our team and family, we are wishing you a very merry Christmas and holiday.

I have really dropped the ball on the blog over the last couple of weeks, and in my queue is a blog post about cutting down our Christmas trees for this year, which maybe I will, in fact, still bust out. But here I am, listening to Caleb record his voice into his remote control robot he got for Christmas (“Naomi poos and Caleb poos!” “Caleb and Naomi are pooing!”), and Naomi swing around her umbrella enthusiastically into furniture and pets, and I am pinching myself at the best sort of chaos in life.

Our shops are closed for Christmas and Boxing Day, and while we are all recovering from the busy-ness, Jon and I continue to be in awe that small businesses like ours, that selling these seemingly niche, esoteric objects (they’re not! Writing is so good for your brain! But I’m preaching to the choir) can provide a sustainable living. In a city like Toronto, as a small business, we sometimes feel like we’re on a small boat (possibly a cross between a dingy and raft) tossed on the waves of property taxes, development fees, hydro bills, commercial taxes, requests for international price matching, increasing shipping costs.

And yet, we survive another year! Our books are closing on 2019, and we are hopeful and excited for what 2020 will bring for us. And as we reflect back on what 2019 has been for us, we are warmed and buoyed by so many of you that have supported us on this journey, and the friendships gained along this bumpy road. While we sometimes consider ourselves lucky that this business is still lurching about, we consider ourselves even luckier to have crossed paths with so many of you within Toronto, from across Canada, and even around the world. Customers, vendors, other shops—what a community this is.

And we are also so tremendously thankful for our team, who problem solve tricky customer requests from different locations, who go the extra mile for customers, each other, and for our family, who rescue customer allergies from Chicken, who read books to, feed and reprimand our children, and who truly are the spirit of our shops. To say we could not do this without them is not nearly enough.

So we are wishing all of you the best of this season, whatever it may bring.