When I first came home and stepped away from “my career” I said yes to all the things and was never really focused on my home. As I said at the start, one of the blessings of my chronic health issues was being forced to be home and focus on home. I don’t want to lose that. I don’t want to just go-go-go all the time. I want to find the balance between housekeeping and hospitality. I want to have slow, quiet days and weeks. I want to be careful with my health. Housekeeping and Hospitality must be held in tension to stay in the golden mean.

But we are the HearthKeepers and we take the reign of darkness and cold and turn her into our handmaid of coziness and warmth. We are not afraid of the darkness and cold for we see how to use them and how to defeat them. We’ve done it over and over, going back down the line of other HearthKeepers behind us and training HearthKeepers coming up after us.

Christmas isn’t about the stuff. (Repeat this with me every day! Christmas isn’t about the stuff!) Christmas is about the gift of being home together as a family, whether that is a blood family, a found family, your church, or your community. Christmas is a broad holiday. It shelters war stories, ghost stories, trees, troubles, and magic. It shelters good Christian men rejoicing! Don’t make it about the stuff.

For the first time in a long time, I feel like I might be able to accomplish some of the things on my pit list and to-do list. I have rooms that need painting, deep cleaning that needs to be done, organization that has fallen by the wayside, and a garage and shed that need to be better utilized. A home must be constantly maintained, or it will fall into disrepair, and this isn’t just cleaning out gutters, but organizing and beautifying.

Instead of feeling like I’m also trapped in a cage, it’s given me a reason for my slow living. I need to go in and out today so that I can keep a close eye on the hens' location. I need to take this break so that they can run around a bit. I need to make sure I’m not gone all the time because these creatures depend on me. What I thought might be a hindrance has proven to be a liberty.

Hospitality is a worthy engagement of our time and skill. It is a worthy endeavor of the homemaker. What are we, ladies, if we’re not being hospitable? Isn’t tending to the physical and emotional needs of others the whole point of all we do? Then it should be within our reach to include others in that worthy work.

This calendar can be a helpful tool for the homemaker. It can help us instill constant diversity in our homes—preventing stress and stagnation—and help us be prepared for the next season’s needs before they’re here. There’s nothing worse than the cold and flu season arriving without medicines, tinctures, and infusions in our cabinets. The homemaker should always strive to be prepared for what’s coming and not stagnate.

We are the base upon which the fires that shelter, clothe, and nurture our people are built. We are the ones who produce belonging and bring in as many as we can hold (be that one other person or one hundred). We HearthKeepers are the hearths of the home. A home can’t be homeful without a homemaker. Start by taking a deep breath and looking at the glory of who we are and what we are doing.

All of us will have areas of home healthcare that come naturally to us, just like we’ll all have areas to shore up, strengthen our faculties in, gain courage, and grow some skills. Right now, young homemakers, embrace the fact that this is part of your work, a big part of your work. Let that empower you. Let that thrill you. Exult in the privilege of managing the healthcare of your people.

Decorating is such a wonder! Ponder on how delightful the customizable-ness of homemaking is! The diversity of tastes! You are not wrong in your excitement to decorate your new home. Go for it, dear ladies! Set up that nest, cozy that space, and create beauty. This is who we are and what we do.

This is our kingdom, ladies. We may share the cooking with our hubbies or even our children, but we should know and grasp the power of a treasured kitchen. From her we make tea to soothe anxiety, pour wine to calm and help conversations flow, and coffee to brighten. Here we clean away dirt and stains and grubbiness. Here we make memories and link people together. All this and more overflows from our kitchens. The kitchen is our biggest and brightest tool as domestic artists. It is our biggest help as the helpers. It is our most faithful co-laborer in our service to others.

Homemaking isn’t so much the work we do as it is the heart with which we do it.

It’s time to build a solid foundation so that when those kids come, hopefully soon, you’re as ready as you can be to welcome them. It is also the time to start learning your people, starting with your new husband, and moving out into your new family and friends. Remember, sear it into your brain, that all we do, we do for our people!

I keep laughing at myself because I struggle with finishing a task all the time! This morning, I got my coffee grinder out, ground some beans, and put the grinder on the counter. Not back. Not away. On the counter. Really, Abby, come on. One must laugh at oneself. But it is worth the work of training myself to notice the half-finished jobs. Now that I’ve started, order is infusing my home, and calm is spreading.

My goal is to return to my original foundation of discussing and exploring the methods of homemaking and the results of implementing those methods. Or, examining results and exploring the methods we might employ to get there. I want to continue to discuss the generational sharing of knowledge.

But most often, in all the little bits and pieces of the day, in the nooks and crannies of life, we are tending mental, emotional, and spiritual wounds. And most often, we’re doing that with words.

There is a feminine chain of creating beauty no matter where we are or what our circumstances are. From prairies to communist countries, in poverty and sickness, all women have figured out how to get flowers, or ribbons, something beautiful. This is part of connecting maid, matron, and crone, our past mothers to our future mothers. We women create beauty.

These are some ways those of us who had great homemaking mothers are still dealing with lost knowledge. We have the chain, but we let it rust. We listened to lies, or were born at a point of change, or all of the above. Now we’re scrubbing that rust off and polishing those links and trying our best to connect our parts of the chain with other women’s knowledge.

Procrastination is when we put off good but hard or annoying or anxiety-laced things for easier things, often bringing harm to us and our homes. It is a lack of self-control, diligence, and courage.

If you have a hole where you expected a daughter, but you are single, childless, daughterless, or separated, open yourself to adopting any number of young women in your family, church, or community. Why? Because we have lost so much knowledge. We all need to set our hands to reforging our knowledge-chains. We may as well heal some trauma as we get the forge going.