It seems that 2006 has come and gone before I could even call out its name and scream “Wait! Hang on a second!” The entire year I have felt like I was behind—behind in my school, in my writing, in my responsibilities, in my life. I was that kid pushing the merry-go-round who could never quite run fast enough to swing her legs up over the side.

Of course, maybe this is more a characteristic of my life than it is simply this year. Only time will tell.

A lot of “things” have happened this year. I started this blog. I fell in love with photography. I broke up with Elijah. My brother got married and my car got stolen (and recovered). I turned eighteen and started college. But those are only particulars. By looking at them you will only understand my whole year as well as the blind men could understand the whole elephant from feeling its trunk, its legs, and its tusks.

The real character of my 2006 can be found not in individual events, but in the intangible, overriding growth that has taken hold of my life and used every experience, good or bad, as an opportunity to say, “You’re not as great as you think you are. Now you must learn to deal.” And although much of me is screaming and pounding the ground with her fists while being dragged by her ankles toward “maturity,” another smaller, hopefully more important part of me wants more than anything to shed this childishness.

Here in my blog, I have mostly recorded the positive or silly things that have happened to me throughout the year. But 2006 had its share of bumps and bruises that never made their way into this little history book. Heartache, unhappiness, friends and family whose lives as they knew them are over—life packs a punch, a fact of which every day makes me more acutely aware. I suppose this is part of growing up.

I would love to tell you that this year’s events and all of its growth has left me with some kind of beautiful clarity about the nature of the universe and my minuscule place in it. But the truth is that in boarding the train to depart 2006, my bags are packed with much more confusion and many more questions than they were when I arrived. (I’ve heard that Gutenberg will do that to you.)

But my questions are good questions, I think, and the journey to finding good answers is a good one too. Also, I am blessed with a family, a community, a school, and friends who are fellow journeyers.

So long, 2006. You’ve been good, if not always fun. Here’s hoping that 2007 will be a year in which we can all come to terms with ourselves and this crazy world and build character through our experiences, good and bad.

(P.S. Thank you, especially, readers, for being here this year. I hope you have enjoyed reading; without your encouragement I never would have kept writing. You are greatly appreciated. )

Don’t let me down, camera.

Don’t let me down, weather.

Don’t let me down, mind.

Don’t let me down, hands.

Don’t let me down, eyes.

Wish me luck, all.

(P.S. Figures I would pick today to majorly break out. At least I’ll be on the right side of the camera, eh?)

Tonight at work I had the distinct pleasure of meeting a very well-spoken woman.

I discovered this fact about her as I was ringing up some dog paraphernalia she was purchasing. She informed me that the dogs on the cards and ornaments she was buying were called Westies. “I have a Westie at home,” she said, “and she’s very aunry.”

I stopped and stared.

“What did you just say?”

“She’s very aunry.”

I still remember the day I discovered the controversy surrounding the word ‘ornery’. I must have been only nine or ten, sitting hunched over my little Performa, furiously tapping away at some undoubtedly eloquent prose.

That’s when it happened: I tried to call someone or something in whatever I was writing ‘aunry.’ I was usually good at spelling, but for some reason I could not call to mind the spelling of this word. I suddenly realized that I had never actually seen it in print. I knew exactly what it meant—stubborn, willful, unpleasant—because I had been called ‘aunry’ by somebody at least once every day for the first seven years of my existence—but I hadn’t the foggiest idea how to spell it.

I figured I would be able to sound it out phonetically. I tried ‘aunry’, ‘onry’, ‘aunrie’, ‘onrie’, each attempt looking more ridiculous than the one before. After several minutes of quiet consternation, I finally asked my mom, the resident expert on the English language, how it was spelled.

“ORNERY?” I exclaimed, sounding out the strange syllables after she showed me the word in the dictionary. How could a word pronounced ‘aunry’ be spelled ‘ORNERY’? This did not make any sense to my ten-year-old brain.

But growing older (and hopefully wiser) means coming to terms with the fact that your own family’s idiosyncrasies are not the only way to do things. Alternatively, it means coming to terms with the fact that everyone in the world except your family does things wrong. I chose the latter route.

Ever since that fateful discovery I have refused to succumb to my friends’ insidious suggestion that ‘ornery’ might actually be pronounced just like it is spelled. I am not sure where my family picked up ‘aunry’—I can only assume it is southern in origin—but now that I have grown up with it I WILL NOT BE TURNED.

So you can imagine my joy this evening, while standing behind the cash register of the anonymous retail location employing me, when that wonderful woman up and said “AUNRY.” Oh, that wonderful woman, and her wonderful, aunry, aunry Westie. I felt like I was facing a long lost relative. Stars danced in front of my eyes, somewhere a band of fiddles struck up, and I reached across the counter and embraced her as I squealed, “Auntie May, you’ve come HOME!”

Just kidding. Actually, I just kind of stood there staring at her until we both felt awkward and then I finally sputtered “You… you say that word right!”

She laughed politely, then turned equally politely away from the counter and started looking at more merchandise, obviously unwilling to acknowledge the fact that there was any other way to say that word. My kind of woman.

I reluctantly continued ringing up and bagging her merchandise, all notions of bringing her back to the farm to bake pies with us slowly slipping from my mind.

But I will always remember her—the woman who proved once and for all how the word ‘ornery’ is correctly pronounced. And don’t any of you try to tell me any different.

Christmas has come and gone. We had a lovely little celebration with our family, from which I will eventually post pictures. In the meantime, please enjoy this column which I wrote for 20Below about Christmas. It was published in the paper today, and you can read it online. But I am also copying it into my blog so that it will be saved if that link ever breaks.

Here it is:

One night, when I was about 7 or 8, I sat in the back seat of our family car with my nose pressed against the cold glass. It was a long drive home, and I occupied myself by staring at the headlights of the oncoming cars, watching them creep closer and closer to our car until WHOOSH! they were gone behind us into the night.

Somehow, this reminded me of looking forward to something. You waited and watched as the special event crept ever closer, and then suddenly in the blink of an eye it was gone.

That is exactly how I experienced Christmas. Around Thanksgiving I would start to realize that my favorite holiday was right around the corner, waiting for me at the end of a torturously long month. As the big day approached, my parents and my brother and I would put up decorations, get a Christmas tree, watch our sputtering VHS tape full of cartoon Christmas specials, and count the days on our Advent calendar.

Finally, I would find myself lying in bed on Christmas Eve, clutching my comforter and squeezing my eyes shut, trying desperately to stop thinking about the next morning so it would just be here.

Christmas was simple back then. Our traditions were comfortingly familiar, year after year. It was never something to worry about it was only something to enjoy. But, like most things in life, Christmas has become more complicated as I have grown older.

Some of the complications are small: my older brother, who used to enforce our Christmas traditions like they were scripture, has moved out and become married. And while we love his wife and her family, watching him start to separate his traditions from ours is bittersweet.

What’s more, my brother and his wife may be moving to another state next year, and I probably will have moved away from home. Next Christmas, our family’s landscape will be completely different. And even though these changes are good, they tug at the heartstrings of that little girl who loved sitting around the tree on Christmas morning with her family.

But some of the complications are more significant. I don’t know whether the world has really become sadder since I was little, or whether I am only now beginning to really see and understand it. I suspect it is the latter. In either case, many of my dearest friends and family have sadness and struggles in their lives—illness, family tensions, loneliness problems that will not magically disappear because of Christmas.

As a child, I heard about people who didn’t get excited about Christmas. They were the reason that the “Whos down in Who-ville” had to reach out to the Grinch—the reason that Tiny Tim had to melt Scrooge’s heart. But I never understood how anyone could actually feel that way.

Now, in light of our messy lives, and the changes and struggles that come at all of us throughout the year, I understand that we could all use some encouragement at Christmastime.

Of course, some things never change. I really do still enjoy Christmas I still love the decorations, the music, the times I get to spend with my family. And Christmas still feels like a car speeding past us in the night.

But now, with a few years of perspective, I can see that while Christmas is an exciting, wonderful time, it is not as simple as I used to believe. And now, more than ever, I appreciate the story of the baby born so long ago in Bethlehem. It is a story that should bring hope to us all, no matter what our Christmas looks like this year.

Because, as Linus put it, “That’s what Christmas is all about, Charlie Brown.”

My long-time friend Hope made me this lovely garment for Christmas:

Freakin’ Sweet.

(A Christmas post is a’comin. In the meantime, Merry Christmas, everyone! I hope that Santa brought you exactly what you wanted, or if he didn’t that you take this opportunity to build some good, solid character out of the whole experience.)