Good morning from my sleepy house to yours!

We celebrated Christmas yesterday, a day later than the rest of the world, because of flight schedules.

So we’re still a little bleary from the festivities, and here the end of the year is staring me in the face.

Good heavens!

I do some goal setting and planning for each year, but in the next few days I’ll be doing a more humble, and more rrrrrich, sort of planning.

When I look back over the past year, some of my favorite moments are so simple.

Long lazy afternoons in the park.
Seeing the cherry blossoms bloom.
Cackling with my girlfriends.
Picking my parents up at the airport.
Smelling the first daphne.
Reading stories to my girl at night. 

Hey, I love cashmere and good champagne and fancy dinners just like anyone.  But the truly best moments of this past year were free, and they happened on totally ordinary days.
If I’m not paying attention, I can miss them completely.

So I go ahead and plan those into my year, and I invite you to do the same.  I think of them as Rituals To Savor.  What are the tiny, simple, beautiful moments that you want to be sure you pay attention to?  What are the humble joys you don’t want to miss?

Go ahead and write them down.

You can use my book A Year Most Lovely (click the photo below for details) or you can just write them down on a piece of paper.

Think of ten moments in your life that cost less than $10 but make you rrrrich.  Write them down.

Just the act of writing them down makes you more likely to savor them when they happen, and to be awake enough to make sure that they do happen! But for added juice, you can post your list somewhere you’ll see it every so often.

Next week we’ll get more strategic and talk about habits and systems, but for today just write down ten things.

Maybe it’s looking at the stars, or celebrating the first snow, or lying on a blanket in the grass. Maybe it’s cooking for your family, or cuddling your kitty, or calling your sister. Maybe it’s the first ripe strawberry or picking apples or watching the red leaves comes down. There’s so much beauty available to us all the time, no matter what’s going on in our lives. This year, declare that you’ll watch for it, welcome it, greet it.