Quick things:

• Want to receive this newsletter via email? Sign up here.
• We’re open for pre-orders/curbside pickup ONLY. Click here for more info, or here to start shopping!
• ICYMI: We have a new website and new web store! If you haven’t already, you’ll need to create a new account to place an order.
• Reminder/heads up: We are open Tuesday thru Thursday this week (that’s 12/29-12/31) then closed Jan 1 thru Jan 11. We will re-open on Jan 12, maybe in-person, maybe not.
• If you want dairy to get you through the week we’re closed, please pre-order it here for pickup on Thursday, 12/31. We have dairy mostly with sell by dates of 1/4-1/7 in inventory currently, and all orders through the normal web store will be filled from that. If you’re a bottle-a-week (or more) household, please consider grabbing one (or more) from inventory and one (or more) pre-order to help us minimize any possible waste!
• All bread this week is frozen.
• Check out our upcoming schedule here.

 

Um….maybe it’s just those quick things this week. I hope your holidays, whatever they are, have been lovely and confined to your own household. Here, we had a lovely Christmas day, and a wonderful Christmas dinner (pictured, though maybe you’ve already seen it). We didn’t do any gift exchanges or anything, and I will say that as much as I missed Christmas with my family, not worrying about any of that stuff felt like a pretty big gift itself this year.

We also had a Zoom get-together with some of my extended family on Christmas Eve, to take the place of the normal annual gathering, and it was really nice to be able to do that at the end of our work day without having to actually go anywhere — and since an increasing number of that side of the family are on the west coast or otherwise non-local, it was a special treat to be able to gather more folks than could have done so in person. Hybrid virtual/in-person events are never very successful, so while I hope our normal Christmas Eve gathering at my aunt’s house will resume next year, I hope we’ll also find ways to continue these virtual events so I can watch my first cousin once removed in Seattle grow up, and and watch my uncle in Portland grow old. (That dig, ahem, is for the benefit of members of that side of the family who may be reading; the rest of you know I’m usually nicer than that!)

Anyway, I hope you, too, have found ways to stay connected and to strengthen connections even when we can’t be together in person. I also hope you’ve been eating well, and finding ways to celebrate even if the normal trappings of celebration were done without this year.

And I hope you’ll do something hopeful and fun to ring in the new year — again, hopefully with your own household. There’s a bit of a cultural sense right now that 2021 will be better than 2020; I think it will be, but it’s certainly not going to happen overnight.  And if we give up on our distancing and safety precautions now, well, 2021 could start off way worse than what we’ve had. Let’s not do that.

But let’s eat pork and sauerkraut* and collard greens and black-eyed peas on New Years Day, and do anything else we can think of to bring good luck. It might just be superstition, but that doesn’t mean it can’t bring us comfort.

Happy new year. I hope we’ll see you in the next couple of days, and I look forward to seeing you — maybe for real! — in a couple of weeks.

Much love,
Julia

*All the sauerkrauts we used to carry have been discontinued. We *may* be getting a delivery of fresh sauerkraut today (Tuesday) from a new supplier, but the POS has also decided not to allow new products to be pushed to the website, so we’ll see if it arrives and see if we can get it for sale….