Happy New Year from All of Us Here at Beautiful Things

In which I look back on 2024 and look forward to 2025...

{December, 31, 2024}

Happy New Year from all of us here at Beautiful Things!

Which means me, really. It’s just me.

It’s just me sitting at my computer, typing in silence.

Which is exactly why I want to end 2024, and start 20025 with an enormous thank you to all of my subscribers. This newsletter continues to grow, slowly but surely, and it never fails to astonish me how many of you are out there, reading my words. So thank you with love to my friends and family who have been reading since the beginning, and thank you with sincere gratitude to my fellow writers on Substack for your support.

But I’d especially like to thank all of you who I’ve never met before, but who read my letters, and sometimes “like” them, comment or send messages - they are simple things but they make writing a less lonely pursuit. I hope you know that the time you spend reading my words will always feel like a privilege to me.

And above all, watch with glittering eyes the whole world around you because the greatest secrets are always hidden in the most unlikely places. Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.

-Roald Dahl

On New Year’s Day 2024, I wrote that the amount of beauty in our world is directly proportional to our willingness to see it. The same, I think, is true of magic.

“Those who don’t believe in magic will never find it.”

I ended my most-read post of 2024, a letter from Provence, with this quote by Roald Dahl, and it’s so true, isn’t it? And so, instead of a year end top ten, I decided to go in search of a few moments of magic from the travels I’ve written about this year…

I have to start, of course, in Provence, where a solitary man riding his horse unexpectedly down a narrow street in the middle of the night started me contemplating magic in the first place.

And then there was Antwerp, where a cast-iron fountain forged at the end of the 15th century reminded me of the life changing power of love.

In Tuscany, an engraved skull reminded me that: As you are, I was too: As I am, you will also be. Memento mori: Remember you must die.

And while it would never not be magical to walk to the top of Glastonbury Tor, it was really the tour guide dressed as a Medieval friar who told me about the time that Jesus came to England on a business trip with his uncle that really made my trip to Glastonbury special.

When I visited Bram Stoker’s Whitby, in Yorkshire in 2023, I discovered that not only can reading books enrich your travel, but travel can enrich your experience of books, too. And literary travel continued to be magical for me in 2024.

I walked in the footsteps of Jane Austen, in Bath and came as close as I’ll probably ever come to attending a Regency ball.

I searched for the real-life stories behind Romeo and Juliet in Verona, and took the 19th-century author Henry James along with me as my guide in the Loire Valley.

And in the beautiful city of Oxford, lingering in the golden gleam, I found Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland.

Sometimes it’s easy to find magic - you’d be crazy not to in cities like Venice and Paris. But I’ll never forget standing on the Academia Bridge in Venice, contemplating the beauty of the city while the sun set over the Grand Canal…or watching the lights twinkle on the Eiffel Tower, and wondering if there’s a word for missing something before you’ve actually left.

A point to anyone who identifies the upcoming locations...

I go back and read my New Year’s post from last year, I’m embarrassed by how many places I said I’d write about in 2024, but didn’t get around to. To get to them, finally, is part of my plan in 2025…but there’s so much more than that. I hope you’ll stick around.

What are your travel plans for 2025? Where will you find your magic?

Wishing you all a 2025 filled with all of the good the world has to offer! Happy New Year!

XO