Maybe the Year Doesn’t Have to End in December

On seasonal endings, quiet beginnings, and making room before the holidays arrive

I have never been particularly good at waiting until December 31st to decide a year is over.

By then, I am tired.

There have been holiday meals and shopping lists and gatherings and decorating and baking and trying to remember whether I bought the thing for the person who specifically asked for the thing. The calendar is packed, the house is glowing, there is probably something involving cheese in my refrigerator, and suddenly the entire world wants me to sit down with a fresh planner and contemplate my hopes, dreams and personal evolution.

Absolutely not.

Give me September.

Give me the first hints that summer is finally loosening its sweaty grip on North Florida. Give me seed catalogs, slightly shorter days, evening walks that do not feel like entering a convection oven, a stack of books beside my chair and a garden beginning to change its rhythm.

That feels like the ending of a year to me.

And, interestingly enough, humans have been organizing life around this kind of seasonal turning for a very long time.

The modern Wiccan Wheel of the Year is a much newer framework, but several of the seasonal festivals woven into it have much older roots. Samhain, traditionally observed around October 31 into November 1, marked the end of the harvest season and the beginning of the darker half of the year in Gaelic tradition. It became associated with the closing of one seasonal cycle and the beginning of another.

I am not suggesting we all need to adopt an ancient calendar or turn our yearly planning sessions into religious observances. That is not really what resonates with me about any of this.

It is the rhythm.

There is something beautifully sensible about allowing the year to begin winding down when the natural world begins winding down too.

There is something satisfying about a year that ends when the fields tell you it is ending rather than when a glittery ball drops in Times Square.

I Think My Year Ends in the Fall

September and October have quietly become my transition months.

The fall garden goes in, which feels completely different from the frantic abundance of spring and summer. There are still seeds and seedlings and plans, of course, because apparently I am biologically incapable of looking at an empty patch of dirt without imagining what I could grow there.

But fall gardening feels calmer to me.

The light changes. The plants change. The urgency changes.

Instead of standing in the garden thinking about everything that needs to happen RIGHT NOW, I begin thinking farther ahead.

What worked this year?

What absolutely did not?

What variety of tomato offended me so deeply that it shall never receive garden space again?

What do I want to grow next spring?

What seeds need ordering?

What should I start earlier?

What am I wildly overestimating my available garden space for this time?

The usual questions.

This is probably why I feel so at home in the seasonal living side of what I write about here at Rooted Living. Gardening has taught me that life has seasons whether I cooperate with them or not. There is a time for planting everything, a time for gathering everything, and a time for sitting down with coffee and admitting that perhaps we do not need seventeen varieties of tomatoes next year.

Although I am making no legally binding promises regarding the tomatoes.

This Year Especially, I Am Ready for the Exhale

2026 has been A YEAR around here. A good year in many ways. A productive year.A creative year. Also a year apparently designed by someone who believes unfinished projects build character.

We have tackled enormous projects around the farm and house. Rooms have been painted and reorganized. The greenhouse has received some serious attention. There have been gardens and websites and writing projects and yoga classes and things built, fixed, moved, sold, planted, redesigned and occasionally stared at while The Hot Hub and I wondered precisely what possessed us to start them in the first place.

Somewhere in the middle of it all, I even I Painted Over the Gray and Found Myself Again, which began as a little household reset and somehow became part decorating project, part identity excavation.

That feels very 2026.

But now the big projects are beginning to close.

And I can feel myself craving smaller things.

I want mornings with my planner spread across the table while I map out next year’s garden. I want to make seed lists. I want to think about what I actually want 2027 to contain before commitments begin multiplying all by themselves.

I want long afternoons reading books.

There are entire worlds waiting for me over in Books, and frankly I feel I have been neglecting my professional responsibility to disappear into them.

I want to write more.

I want to wander back into my beloved Craft Cottage and make things again simply because making them makes me happy.

I want stained glass scattered across my worktable. I want half-finished creative experiments. I want music playing. I want to rediscover that delicious feeling of losing several hours because I became completely absorbed in making something with my hands.

Mostly, I want some room.

Not empty room.

Breathing room.

Ending Things Makes Space for Beginnings

We tend to talk endlessly about beginnings.

New goals. New habits. New projects. New years. New plans.

Beginning something is exciting. It carries possibility. Everything is still shiny and wonderfully unruined by reality.

Endings get considerably worse marketing.

But I am beginning to think endings deserve more respect.

Finishing something creates space.

Deciding something has run its course creates space.

Cleaning up the remnants of an old project creates space.

Looking at a habit, commitment, goal or expectation and deciding, No, I do not actually want to carry this into another year, creates tremendous space.

That is why this season feels connected to something I wrote earlier this year about learning to Begin Again. Beginning again is not always about adding something new. Sometimes the beginning only becomes visible after we finally put something else down.

That might be my favorite thing about thinking of autumn as the ending of my year.

I do not have to immediately fill every opening.

I can simply make room.

What If We Started Winding Down Before December?

Imagine arriving at December without carrying an entire year’s worth of unfinished business on your back.

Imagine the holidays being celebrations rather than deadlines.

Imagine January arriving and not feeling like you need to reinvent yourself because you have already spent several months quietly considering what stays, what goes and what you would like to grow next.

That sounds considerably better to me than trying to discover my life’s purpose while eating leftover Christmas cookies on December 30th.

So this year, I am starting now.

If that sounds good to you too, here are seven gentle ways we can begin closing the year before the holiday season comes barreling through the front door.

1. Finish before you begin. Look around at the projects already taking up physical or mental space. Choose one or two that genuinely need finishing before the end of the year. Not fifteen. We are winding down, remember? The purpose is closure, not accidentally launching a fourth-quarter productivity competition with yourself.
2. Make a “not coming with me” list. I love a good goal list, but this one may be even more useful. What habit, obligation, expectation, unfinished idea or recurring annoyance do you have absolutely no desire to drag into another year? Write it down. Sometimes knowing what we are leaving behind tells us more than another list of things we intend to accomplish.
3. Walk through the year you actually lived. Flip through your planner. Scroll through your photographs. Look at the garden notes, calendar appointments, trips, projects, celebrations and ordinary Tuesdays that made up your year. We forget an astonishing amount of our own lives. Before rushing toward the next one, notice this one.
4. Begin planning one thing you are excited about. Not everything needs to be serious reflection. I am already thinking about the spring garden, seeds and what I want growing around me next year. Maybe your thing is a trip, a reading list, a creative project, a room you want to change or something completely ridiculous that makes you smile whenever you think about it. Give yourself something lovely to anticipate.
5. Create a winter comfort plan. What would make the coming months feel good? Mine involves books, writing, time in the Craft Cottage, garden planning, cozy food, cooler walks and considerably less frantic running around. Yours might look completely different. The question is simply: What helps me feel restored? Put more of that on the calendar before everything else claims the space.
6. Close some loops. Return the thing. Schedule the appointment. Donate the bag sitting by the door. Cancel the subscription you keep forgetting about. Put the photographs in the album. Answer the message. Small unfinished tasks have a strange way of occupying enormous amounts of mental real estate. Pick a few and evict them.
7. Leave some blank space. This may be the hardest one. Do not immediately assign a goal to every open weekend. Do not build a seventeen-category self-improvement plan because a new planner gave you ideas. Leave some pages blank. Leave an afternoon unscheduled. Leave a garden bed undecided. Give next year’s version of you some room to surprise the current one.

The Quiet Part of the Cycle Matters Too

One thing I appreciate about older seasonal traditions is that darkness was not automatically treated as something to defeat.

It was part of the cycle.

Harvest ended.

Days shortened.

Work shifted.

People prepared for winter.

The world did not remain endlessly productive because humans wanted another quarter of growth.

The Library of Congress notes the connection between Samhain, “summer’s end,” and the seasonal and life cycles surrounding the beginning of winter, while Smithsonian’s history of Samhain explores its relationship to the ending harvest season and the beginning of a new yearly cycle.

There is wisdom in that even if we leave every bit of religion out of it.

We are allowed to have seasons.

We are allowed to grow wildly for a while and then pull inward.

We are allowed to finish.

We are allowed to rest.

And perhaps most importantly, we are allowed to create a life whose rhythms actually make sense to us instead of automatically following whatever the calendar says we should be doing.

So This Is My Beginning of the Ending

For the next several weeks, I will be putting the garden into its cooler rhythm.

I will be closing out our big projects.

I will be ridiculously happy with my planners and colored pens.

I will start making my spring seed list, which will undoubtedly become unreasonable at some point.

I will pull books from the shelves and make little stacks of things I want to read.

I will hopefully wander back into the Craft Cottage and find my creative brain waiting for me among the stained glass and supplies.

And when December arrives, I want to be able to enjoy it.

I want the lights and the food and my family.

I want cozy evenings and celebrations.

I do not want to spend the last week of the year frantically auditing my existence.

Because maybe endings do not need to happen all at once.

Maybe a year can close slowly.

A garden bed at a time.

A finished project at a time.

A cleared shelf, an answered question, a crossed-off task, a book opened beside a warm cup of coffee.

Maybe this quieter ending is exactly what makes room for whatever wants to begin next.

And maybe that is the glimmer hiding inside endings:

An ending is not empty space.

It is space becoming available.

And I am beginning to think that might be one of the loveliest things we can give ourselves.

Something to Ponder

If you let your year begin winding down now instead of waiting until December 31st, what would you like to finish, release, enjoy or make room for?

Tell me in the comments.

I have a feeling I am not the only one ready for a long, lovely exhale.