Merry Christmas and Season’s Greetings

Pen friends, we are wishing you all season’s greetings and the best of December and the end of the year and Christmas and Santa and the lighting of candles and I mostly hope you took it easy on yourself and if not I hope you at least had some good chocolate and if not I mean, let’s get you some good chocolate.

I had meant to post this on Christmas, but each year brings different distractions and here I am glad to at least be getting this out before the new year.

I can, in some moments, hardly believe we’ve arrived here. So much has happened since we first opened this shop! So many units of time, years, seasons, Christmases, but also just life. The end of the year sometimes gets you nostalgic. And I’m nostalgic but I’m also mostly just trying to soak it all in, to take all of those moments and people and cats and pens and add them to the soup of life.

We are so grateful for our team, without whom we could do nothing. Everyone keeping things humming, orders being packed up, emails being responded to, new products in and counted and sorted and up on the website and price tagged, floors swept and mopped. Grateful for Brendan who runs the ship, who reminds everyone about everything, who has bounced all of the babies on his lap at one point or another, who has keeps us from floating too far off into the clouds.

And of course we wouldn’t be here without all of you, browsing the website, wandering the shop, finding things to keep your desktops organized or to keep your brain from throbbing or to keep your fingers busy. As always, your community and support has kept our doors open, but also has kept our spirits up. I don’t know that we’d be here still, through so many moves and the pandemic, without the tangible support from pen people local and from afar. People who get it in the same way that we do.

It’s been a year! Lots of collaborations, new products, a return to Scriptus, Letter Writing Club, more to come. It has not been an easy year for many of us, although we had more than our share of joy with baby Junia joining us. While we found out some bad news about Tuna, ours and not ours, he has clung on for longer than we first heard he would, perhaps his love for Chicken buoying him along. Gifts and treasures and joy in the cracks.

What a ride, the triumph of a tiny stationery shop in the new millenium, to have made it thus far, to still be putting pads of paper and bottles of potions and lotions on the shelves.

After the feast of presents, including a few that ended up in the cat bowls, our two loving and affectionate and loyal felines best friends were wiped.