A quiet New Year arrives in Honey Hill Country, bringing stillness, reflection, and the promise of days yet to be read.
The New Year has come quietly to Honey Hill Country.
A cold winter morning has settled in. Snow lies clean and unbroken beneath the trees, save for a line of rabbit tracks stitching their way across the yard and disappearing into the brush. Frost rests easy on the fence rails, and the woods hold the kind of silence that only follows a good snowfall — deep, listening, and kind.
No fanfare, no fuss — just the slow turning of the calendar page, with a fresh stack of new mornings waiting to be opened on the kitchen table. The old year folded itself away politely, and the new one stepped in like a neighbour removing their hat at the door.
Out here, the year always begins the same way — with a pause.
There is time to look back at what was carried, what was learned, and what, perhaps, is ready to be set down. There is time to stand a moment longer at the window and consider what might yet come walking up the lane. And there is time — always time — to say, You Are Welcome Here.
Honey Hill Country remains much as you left it — and Little Red Bear is still right where he has always been.
The paths are familiar. The front porches are swept. The kettle is warm — Little Red Bear is keeping it so. Your choice, coffee or tea. Fresh biscuits, always. The stories continue — some by the fire, some on the page, and some quietly, heart to heart.
As the new year unfolds, there will be small kindnesses, ordinary miracles, and a few good surprises tucked between the days. There will be laughter that arrives unannounced. There will be reflections that linger. And there will be new rhythms settling gently into place, one week at a time.
Later this month, something long-planned and much-loved will find its way into the light — The Hearth & Holler Gazette, a weekly visit of tales, tidings, and old-time country comfort, shared from Little Red Bear’s corner of Honey Hill Country and meant to be read slowly, like the morning paper at the table.
But for now, there is no rush.
This first week of January is for standing still just long enough to take a breath, to look around, and to remember that beginnings do not need to be loud to be meaningful.
So welcome — to the New Year, to Little Red Bear’s Honey Hill Country, and to whatever good may yet come.
The gate is open. The light is on.
Come in when you are ready.
— Jim (and Red!)
“A new year does not ask us to be different people,”
Clara Thimblewick once wrote,
“only to listen a little more closely to the better parts of ourselves.”
Pen-and-ink illustrations created with the assistance of AI and lovingly styled for Little Red Bear Land.
James Milson - The Writing Pages 