If I could comb through all the posts this year where I wrote the actual word “joy,” it would probably be embarrassing. Overuse of anything is never exciting. That usually signals that a dependence or an artifice or a crutch is involved. A thing that is trying to act as something else… a salve or a mask or a comfort. Could the kitchen really have provided all that this year?

The Oxford dictionary defines joy as both a noun and a verb. It’s defined as a person, a place, a thing. But also it is defined as an action, an occurrence, a state. It’s a tangible word and a guiding light all in one. It’s an immediate touchpoint and a faraway beacon. It’s a feeling. It’s an aspiration. It’s an anticipation. It’s joy. JOY!

In other words, it is as easy and as complicated to describe as any three-letter word can be.

This year, the Vintage Kitchen said hello to our biggest year yet. Our blog posts met more new readers from around the globe than ever before.

And the kitchen shop grew in leaps and bounds. In just one extra special day, of all the days, the shop welcomed over 15,000 visitors and grew in awareness and engagement tenfold over the course of twelve months. So much kitchen love!

We sent packages as far away as New Zealand this year and as close as 10 miles down the road in our home city of Nashville, TN. We globetrotted our way around the kitchen from Hungary to India, to Ireland to Indonesia to Israel and back home again to America. We prepared fish dishes, chicken dishes, dessert dishes, brunch dishes, and vegetarian vegetable dishes. We answered a plethora of questions about dishes. About your dishes. How much, how old, how rare? And we had the pleasure of learning more about unique artifacts from New Mexico, Minnesota, North Carolina, Florida, Georgia and California as fellow vintage lovers shared their personal collections and the stories behind them.

This year, we celebrated with several enthusiastic press mentions …

and we reveled in each and every one of the comments that shoppers sent to us upon receiving their vintage packages in the mail. With each new journey and each new milestone, my cup of joy runneth over. It’s not only a celebration of effort acknowledged but also a testament to the genuine care and stewardship of our community’s love of history and the objects in it. Whether it be a story, a recipe, or a tangible object, each item that passes through the Vintage Kitchen finds not only a new home but also a new layer of story, one that will ultimately mark, affect and carry forth a fresh perspective of old character for new generations to come.

In November, we had to make the very tough decision to temporarily close the shop down for the holiday season while we embarked on our biggest adventure of the year – a South to North move. This temporary pause in shopkeeping not only reminded me how much I truly love this land of the Vintage Kitchen and all the aspects of it, but it also reminded me that once you find true joy and purpose it will never completely leave you. I was so happy to see that even though the shop was closed for a bit and a big source of my creativity was stunted because of it, communication from this lovely vintage kitchen community never let up. You kept in touch.

While we are staying in a temporary waterside cottage awaiting some big plans for a big announcement coming soon, I knew everything was going to be okay in regards to leaving the shop unattended for a bit when, on the very first day that we arrived, I spotted a beacon in the cottage bookshelf. Tucked in between the potted plants and the Polish pottery, there was a cookbook. And not just any cookbook. There was…

Joy of Cooking! Irma Rombauer knew her own series of trials and tribulations throughout her life but she cast those aside in her middle years and went after the pursuit of a passion. She found it in the kitchen. It was the one place she would come to know best in the world. And in that kitchen, following that passion, she made joy…

Throughout the rest of her life, Irma witnessed firsthand, the endless amounts of joy that good food and good cooking brought not only to herself but also to every kitchen it touched. Maybe it was just a coincidence that this cookbook just happened to be in the cottage, just at the right time taht I needed to see it, but given the fact that there are millions of cookbooks floating around in the world, and the cottage could have been the holder of any one of those, the notion that it was a vintage JOY was pretty comforting. I like to think that it was a little sign from Irma herself, sent with love and a little message about joy in cooking, of cooking, for cooking and how it prevails always, no matter what kitchen you find yourself in.

So it is with complete love and gratitude, that I say THANK YOU so much to everyone who contributed to bringing joy to our little section of the world this year. Thank you for being both the noun and the verb. Thank you for keeping in touch. Whether you submitted a comment, made a recipe or purchased a piece of history from the shop, thank you. I hope you’ll always be a part of our joyful landscape and that we can continue to inspire each other year after year after year.

Cheers to a new year full of new potential and bright possibilities in the kitchen and beyond.

Happy New Year!