The Final 'So I Won't Forget' of 2024...a whole year of remembering as a monthly habit.

published on the first day of 2025 because let's not rush this.

My inbox is stuffed to the gills.

I’ve mostly ignored it for the last two weeks and while that was refreshing and something I did intentionally, I’m ready to come up for air. I can’t think clearly with Old Navy emailing me for the forty-eighth time about the doorbuster they’re having on kids’ sweatpants. We have enough sweatpants thank you very much and I’ve never received more emails from any institution in the history of electronic mail.

I think my inbox may be a metaphor for the fun, but blurry week we’re all living. Sandwiched between the arrival of Christmas and the impending January regular-ness, I find my disrupted routine to have been both necessary and disorienting.

What time do I need to get up? I don’t know.

What are the kids doing today? I don’t know.

Do I have any work I need to do? Probably, but my book just got really good.

What’s for dinner? Ugh, dinner…another day of people needing to eat food.

Photo by Alexander Grey on Unsplash

But life has not stopped happening all around me even though I didn’t check my email. I have dear friends who just yesterday attended a funeral, another friend who begins cancer treatment next week, and another who spent Christmas in the hospital with a sick child. All things necessary, but still wildly disorienting. It’s no wonder we want to move on to the next thing, to plan something as if we’re in control, to dream about what we’ll be when we finally grow up.

The temptation to escape the blur this time of year seems to always be organize, reinvent, strategize, vision-plan, make a list, start strong, but I wonder if we’ve gotten it wrong. I’ve spent the last year looking backward at the end of each month and I can earnestly say it is the best work I’ve done. When I started the So I Won’t Forget series, I wasn’t totally sure what would come of it, but I believed I needed to practice what I preach—remembering as a spiritual practice, remembering as a means to anchor ourselves to God’s story, remembering to cultivate defiant gratitude. Sitting down to write my last one for 2024, I’ve never been more convinced that this is necessary work. When I’m finished, I can check my email and, among other things, unsubscribe from Old Navy door busters.

So without further lead up, I submit to you the final installment of So I Won’t Forget for 2024…three things I want to remember from the past month.

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#1…a great (kitchen) light

The lights in our kitchen randomly went out at the beginning of the month.

At the time I had just planned four straight weeks of hosting dinners at our home for Advent. This is our most precious holiday tradition and one that ironically involves eating by candlelight. I was annoyed. We had been relishing our newly remodeled home, one that we couldn’t do Christmas in last year thanks to storm damage, and already something was broken. It’s as if I learned nothing from the year I spent knee-deep in home renovation.

Our first week’s guests arrived and we laughed about how the lights weren’t working. We explained that we hadn’t planned to cook in the dark, but thankfully our appliances were still running and the rest of the house was lit. Monday morning came and I was low-grade irritated about calling the electrician who confirmed it would be another week before they could actually make the repairs. We spent the first week of Advent reflexively trying to turn on the lights to no avail and welcomed Week Two with a new wave of dinner guests to the same darkened kitchen.

I’d love to say that I immediately got the metaphor, that as a writer and someone who takes notes on life I relished the opportunity to think deeply about what was happening, but the truth is the darkness just made me feel grumpy. No working lights on the increasingly shorter days left me weary and irritable in a way that I didn’t fully acknowledge until the lights came on. And when they did, thankfully around Week Three, we all squinted our eyes because, holy moly, when the light breaks in you realize you forgot how bright it actually is.

In her perfectly named book Shadow & Light: A Journey Into Advent,

Tsh Oxenreider

teaches about Advent as a journeying from darkness to light. The first few weeks paired with dark purple candles remind us how God’s people waited for the promises to come true, how they ached for the light of the Messiah. By the third week the candle is pink, a subtle lightening from the darker purple colors.

“Advent acknowledges shadows and dims them with burgeoning light. So we wait in expectation for the full, radiant, overwhelming light to one day wipe out all darkness forever. This is the hope of Advent.”(Oxenreider, 28)

Next year, we’ll be keeping our kitchen lights off on purpose. We’ll squint in the darkness so we can remember what it’s like to fumble around and wait for the light. We’ll complain just a little about how it’d be much easier if the lights were on, but it will remind us in the most literal way—that “the people living in darkness have seen a great light…”¹

#2…headphones at the table

Our youngest daughter has decided that the most intolerable noises in the history of the universe are that of her siblings chewing their food. A few weeks ago, she suddenly tuned her ears to the sounds of their snacking and we’ve all been suffering under the weight of her realization.

So much groaning…ugh, gross, stop it, ewwwww…cue the angry tears.

She’s not your typical sensory kid so her reaction caught us all a bit by surprise. The most normal part of all of this has been the fierceness of her protests. Subtle is never a word I’d use to describe her so it makes sense that when she finally succumbed to wearing noise cancelling headphones at the table she would do it with gusto. Two nights ago, she sat firmly in her chair donning bright pink headphones and the cutest irritated pout. Her face was mostly blocked by her sparkly new water bottle and she was wearing leggings with torn knees and a Hawaiian shirt imprinted with the faces of the other four members of our family on it.²

She was a moment in time for sure. Even she knew it because she started to grin when she noticed we were all giggling at her. As I tucked her into bed that night, I tried to introduce the idea that sometimes we tune our attention to things and it’s hard to redirect our eyes, ears, and hearts. I told her things the former therapist in me has said to adult clients…you can actually do things to help redirect your focus. You can tell yourself the truth (like my siblings aren’t trying to punish me when they chew their food). You have agency to choose a different seat or use kind words to ask for what you need. Or frankly, put on pink headphones and be adorable because that’s better than yelling.

I didn’t even charge her for the session.

Perhaps the lesson is that we’re all Cece with the pink headphones sometimes. We zero in on something that steals our focus from the table set before us. We let anxiety or anger creep in until the simplest thing like eating a meal becomes a personal affront to our agenda for comfort or control. We’re all just doing grown-up versions of childlike things, aren’t we? Hopefully with a bit more wisdom, and little less pride so we don’t miss the small stuff that reminds us of the big stuff.

Photo by Icons8 Team on Unsplash

#3…thoughts on a social media break

It seems like everyone in my world is taking a social media break so I jumped on the bandwagon this season too. Here are some thoughts on my experience:

• It’s almost like taking a break from social media is trendy now. Does that matter? Maybe only to the extent that we should really think about our motivation for taking a break. We don’t all have toxic relationships with social media, some of us just have regular relationships that need a normal amount of check-in.

• I liked being free and clear of advertisements. I liked being free of the “noise” we often experience online, but I did feel slightly disconnected and I’ve had to think about whether that feeling of disconnectedness is good or not. I agree with almost all of the research and thought around being low-tech. We are most certainly a low-tech family, but I also believe whole-heartedly that there are people using technology well to create more truth, beauty, and goodness. I don’t want to miss that by being so black and white about my social media usage.

• I need a plan and a plan to check in with the plan. For now that looks like scaling down who I follow on IG, enforcing a few time limits that work for me, choosing a day or two each week that I won’t use it at all, and planning a few months/seasons this year where I’ll do exactly what I just did—sit out for a little while to reset.

I’m earnestly looking for more wisdom on this topic which is partly why I even bothered to log my thoughts here for you to see…so I won’t forget to keep checking in with myself and with you about these things that matter in our world. If you feel like your approach to social media is working for you, consider this your invitation to share.

Photo by Austin Chan on Unsplash

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And finally, on this series that I have loved so much…So I Won’t Forget…

This monthly forced reflection has born fruit in my heart and mind all year. I’ve relished the feedback from those who it’s resonated with and I’ve cherished your responses when you’ve practiced your own remembering. The email marketing gurus tell me that including a call to action in whatever I send you is a good way to foster reader engagement—fancy words for let me ask you to do something and see if you respond—but that’s different than what I actually want to say:

This changed me and blessed me, why don’t you try it too?

Before you set your goals for the year or succumb to the onslaught of self-improvement strategies, practice remembering. Look backward and take stock of the all the hidden or obvious ways God has met your needs or caused you to grow.

Remember what He’s done so you can trust Him with your future.

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Here’s a list of some other resources on the topic by yours truly AND by some really incredible thinkers/writers here on Substack:

• Why I Won’t Wish You a “Happy New Year” by

  Kimberly Phinney

• What Your Christmas Tree Says About God’s Faithfulness by Sarah K Butterfield at

  The Scoop

• Restore: I Remember. You Renew. by

  Kayla Craig
  - this one has a guided journal called Gathering Stones - a super practical resource for remembering

• 5 Ways to Practice Remembering - a 30 minutes podcast episode for your freezing walk around the block with your new weighted vest…or just for listening while you do normal stuff.

1. Matthew 4:16, NIV translation

2. Yes, we did get shirts with each others’ faces on them inspired by the lovely Ilona Maher—I wrote about that in July’s issue of So I Won’t Forget