The Yule Log Is Free

We announced a printed catalog for Christmas and put fifty dollars on the cover. Two editions, half the line hidden behind a printed code, the whole wish book routine. It was a beautiful object. It was also a store charging admission at the door, and we could not talk ourselves past that.

So the price is gone, and so is the catalog. What we are making instead is The Yule Log, and it is free. Not a sales flyer with a bow on it. A Christmas annual, the kind that used to live in a kitchen drawer and come back out every December until the cover gave up.

What is in it: where the yule log actually comes from, which is older and stranger than the cake. Things to build on a Saturday with a kid handing you the wrong tool. Things to do at a table when it goes dark at four in the afternoon. Cider on the stove. Ornaments you cut from a branch, and the reason half of them will crack.

Our own things are in there the way a chair is in a photograph of a room. Nothing is hidden. Nothing needs a code.

Alex is taking the photographs. Real ones, in Wisconsin, in the actual cold, which is the only place this particular kind of warm makes any sense.

It goes up here first, free to read. Then it gets printed, and a copy rides along in every order that leaves the shop. If you are not buying anything and you want one anyway, that is fine too. Ask, and we will put one in the mail.