I spent last weekend in Indiana, celebrating the 90th birthday of my grandmother, Mary Elizabeth Barnette, known affectionately as Grandmommy to her six grandchildren, and Mary Lib to everyone else.

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While Stephanie and I were in Thailand last year preparing to go to India, my sister Katie was preparing to quit her job and travel across Europe for 3 months by herself. Though it would have been very cool if our paths had crossed—we arrived in France a few days before she flew out of London—in some ways I’m glad we didn’t because it made her journey wholly hers.

While traveling, she quickly realized the futility of keeping her blog up to date, which was smart, because instead she focused her attention on the experience itself—as well as capturing it with enough photos and keepsakes to fill several 3-inch binders. And yet, incredibly, she continued updating her blog with tales from her trip in the months since she’d returned home. There was a lull at the end of last year, but then in January the posts resumed with a vengeance, motivated, I think, by the approaching one-year anniversary of her trip.

Her accomplishment is a triumph in and of itself, but the stamina required to continue blogging about it for a year afterward boggles the mind. As a proud and doting brother, I wanted to celebrate Katie reaching the finish line of her blogging journey. One of the things in her posts that tickled me time and time again were all the things she did for luck, things I’d never heard of before, and probably wouldn’t have done myself. And yet there she was, dutifully following in the footsteps of countless others, performing these secret rites of European passage. She is very lucky indeed.

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To our friends and family all around the world: we wish you a very happy new year.

To the casual outside observer, my mom has “a Santa problem”, which we playfully tease her about every Christmas (even though we all secretly love it). She morbidly taunts us that when she’s dead and gone, her Santa problem will become our problem—our inheritance won’t be counted in thousands of dollars, it will be thousands of Santas, muahahaha!

Well, it seems she’s not content to wait until she’s dead and gone. This year I got a very cool Santa Claus of my own, custom-made by Michelle Treichler, complete with a stack of Melt-in-the-Mouth Cookies and miniature reproductions of Woman’s Day Magazine (where the recipe first appeared).

While Stephanie and I were making our way across India and East Africa last spring, Katie, my sister, was traveling by herself across Europe. Our paths almost crossed—we arrived in Nice on June 5th just before she flew home from London on the 8th.

During her trip, on the way from Barcelona to Rome, she spent two nights with Stephanie’s mom in France, near Cannes. Keep in mind, they’d never met before, but apparently they hit it off—we heard so many stories from them that it seemed like they’d spent a whole week together, not just a whole day.

All that to say, Katie has just updated her blog with a photo-filled post about their action-packed day, touring Grasse, Valbonne, Biot, Antibes, and Cannes. Check it out.