Trend Alert: 2022 is OVER
Dancing with our moms at our wedding on November 26th.
2022 was one of the most exhilarating, exciting years of our lives. And I’m so glad it’s over.
We started the year off by doing a Trifecta of Ridiculous Things: preparing for our debut book publication, planning a ginormous kitchen renovation, and buying our Tennessee home. In one 10-day period we closed on our home, had our existing kitchen gutted, flew to New York for our first television appearance to promote our book (bartending on Watch What Happens Live!), and published our first book, Housewarming, with Abrams Books. It was a lot of good things to mentally and emotionally handle, all while keeping up with our regularly scheduled work on social media. I’m aware this paragraph is probably very unrelatable, because it feels weird to me too. Whose life is like that? It feels...odd.
Behind the bar on Watch What Happens Live!
Signing our book Housewarming on publication day at Garden District Books in Uptown New Orleans!
Closing on our Tennessee home!
The emotional high didn’t stop there though. A couple of months later we were invited on to the Today Show for our first DIY segment (watch it here!), and later that week moved to Tennessee for the summer and got to experience what it feels like to call somewhere other than Southeast Louisiana “home” for the first time ever. We spent weekends having bonfires and rafting, driving through the Blue Ridge Mountains, and entertaining a rotating cast of visitors from New Orleans and beyond who kept our hearts happy and full. All the while getting to spend so much time with a couple of our best friends who live in the area and were the reasons we fell in love with East Tennessee in the first place. We were also in the middle of doing a book tour, getting to visit cities we love and cities that we would come to love, like Richmond and Raleigh and Nashville.
In-studio demo with Hoda and Jenna on Today!
Arriving to Tennessee in June after a long day of driving—celebrating with some wine.
“Best Friends Outdoors” kind of sums up our summer!
It was during our Nashville trip in July—influenced in part by a recent visit from our moms and feeling very at home in Tennessee—that we decided we were done waiting and decided we’d have our wedding at our home in November. We’d have four months to slap together a wedding for the weekend after Thanksgiving and well that sounded like enough time. Between July and November we travelled back and forth to New Orleans as our kitchen renovation was completed (see it here!), took our moms to Paris (a trip we’d planned and booked during COVID! See all that we did here!), and finalized all of the plans for our little 50-person wedding at our home in Tennessee (see some highlights here!).
PJ, Thomas, and Hayli in Nashville with us—this was the day we decided on a wedding date and they were the first to know!
The week our New Orleans kitchen renovation wrapped! Still my favorite view of the kichen.
At the bottom of the Eiffel Tower with moms!
The week of November 21st saw us prepare the home for a 20-person Thanksgiving, followed immediately by a 50-person wedding. We both feel it was the best, most wonderfully chaotic week of 2022 and also our lives. We got to experience having some of the people we love most on this earth drive or fly in to celebrate with us—some making 20-hour+ roadtrips to do so. We’ve never felt so supported or so grateful. It’s a week I’ll never forget.
Sitting down for Thanksgiving dinner, our first holiday hosted in the Tennessee home!
My brother Max speaking at our wedding dinner :’’’)
December was spent coming down from one heck of a year, preparing our Tennessee home to overwinter, and packing for the holidays in New Orleans. We’ve been back in New Orleans since December 14th and have been spending our time decorating the house for Christmas, completing little house tasks left and right, and going to Christmas parties. We’re ending on a high note by hosting our families for Christmas and entertaining out of town guests for New Years—a perfect cherry on top of a year that feels like the cherry on top of our lives. The year ahead is a blank slate, but my intention is to fill it with quiet mornings and long dinners and days that have no plans.
2022 was one of the most exhilarating, exciting years of our lives. And I’m so glad it’s over. I’m a Pisces cliche of living with my head in the clouds and in my dreams, always looking to the future, but I’ve never been more excited for what’s already front of me.
Thank you for joining us on this whirlwind of a year. We’ve had periods of stepping back a little from the internet because it can be a lot at times, but we feel so loved and supported by our online family that’s been here since the beginning or just now joining along for the ride. I hope you have a beautiful end to your year, and that your 2023 is as full or as empty as you want it.
Love,
Beau & Matt & Fox & Barley & Rye