Are you all getting ready for this most holy of nights? As I write this (in the morning of today), we’ve got cleaning and baking and neverending coffee 🙂 and Christmas carols and candy canes and clean clothes for Mass and gift-preparing going on, from the oldest to the youngest. What a wonderful time!

Before I sign off for Christmas, I wanted to let you know two fun things:

— Yesterday Haley at Carrots for Michaelmas and Christy from Fountains of Home interviewed me for their Fountains of Carrots podcast. I know! It was an awesome hour of talking about some really fun things, all having to do with architecture. Ha! 😀 Of course it was names. It’s so fun to talk with people who love the names of our faith as I do. Just like all of you! I’ll let you know when it posts — probably sometime in January — and you can listen while you fold laundry or wash dishes or relax with a cup of coffee or whatever you do when you listen to a podcast!

— Remember the guest post from The Catholic Hipster (Tommy Tighe)? And how he’s working on a book called The Catholic Hipster Handbook, due out in Spring 2017 from Ave Maria Press? He asked me if I would be interested in contributing to it! I know! There’s no guarantee what I wrote will make it into the final book but … it might! It was a really fun piece to work on and I’m just still in a swoony awe that something I wrote might actually appear in a published book.

So those are my fun tidbits to wrap up Advent with! With that, I want to tell you all, again, how very blessed my life has been because of you all. Life is full of so much sadness and suffering, which we know Jesus uses to draw us closer to Him, but it’s also full of joy, all of which comes from Him. This blog and our name conversations have been part of the joy of my life for the past year — such good, wholesome, innocent, joyful fun. Thank you all, a million times! ❤

I’ll be off the blog from now until Monday January 4, with the exception of the Monday consultation, which I’ll post as usual on December 28 and moderate the comments as needed.

And now — off to prepare for our Little Lord! Fall on your knees! O Night Divine! O Holy Night! A merry merry and very blessed Christmas to you and your loved ones!

Jean-Baptiste Marie Pierre [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons