Merry Christmas, everyone!

Dee and I wish you all a Merry Christmas, Happy New Year and happy holidays of all kinds. Through this blog and through the Hatchville Pottery Facebook page, we have friends on almost every continent. (Any potters active in Antarctica?) That kind of connection is a real blessing. We know the joy and pain of many of those friends, and we know the great pots many of them are producing. I love that.
Many people around me and friends my age are retired or thinking about retirement, and I am often asked, "So, is this pottery a retirement thing that you do?" To which I do not usually have a civil answer.
For the past decade or more, pottery has been the next thing I do, not the retirement thing I do.
I think I keep getting better, making better pots, more interesting pots, more complex pots. Why would I not want to keep doing that? And replace it with what?
This year, I started serving on the board of directors of The Studio Potter, a good and serious-minded hard-copy pottery magazine struggling to find subscribers in a digital world. I'm very new and at times very much trying to catch up with the others on the board. But I've made new friends and connections I'd never have made without the magazine. And maybe I can help.
And this year I talked my a-little-bit-reluctant friend Kim Medeiros of The Barn Pottery in Pocasset into a weekend woodfiring at the Truro Center for the Arts at Castle Hill. She got great pots from the train kiln there by the ocean, pots that I personally thought were the best that came from that firing. And she fell in love with wood. Friend Dan Finnegan of Fredericksburg, Va., is coming here in a couple of weeks to talk about guiding the two of us through the building of our own wood kiln in the spring.
Our holiday kiln-opening and open studio was busier than ever; Kim, Lois Hirshberg and I sold more pots than ever before. Kim and I sold many pots right out of the warm kiln. Much jewelry, blown glass, coffee and paper goods went out the door, as well.
With luck, this winter we'll add studio and gallery space to the front of my current studio here in Hatchville. Our friend Mike Race, known by some of you, will do the building. More room for good pots.
Things keep changing and growing around here. Hoping it stays that way for many years.
Happy Holidays, everyone.

The photos: Our gallery, in a snowstorm a year or two ago, the photo used in a recent e-mail greeting from The Studio Potter magazine; one of my bowls from the Truro wood kiln; and one of Kim's pots from the Truro kiln, a pot that now lives comfortably here on a kitchen shelf with Ray Finch, Dan Finnegan, Doug Fitch and Hannah McAndrew.

Ray Finch: 1914-2012

Dee and I met Ray Finch at Winchcombe Pottery in Gloucestershire, U.K., about ten years ago. Toff Milway took us over to Winchcombe from his pottery, which is nearby in the Cotswolds. Ray was in his late 80s then, but still making pots. So was his co-worker Eddie Hopkins. Ray was gentle and courtly and seemed pleased to meet one of Dan Finnegan's students from the U.S. Eddie was lively and joking and wanted to be remembered to "Dan the Yank."

Now they're both gone. Eddie died in 2007 of a lung disease contracted from floodwater swallowed while he clung to the side of his house in deep water. Ray died yesterday, after a long life making pots.

Long before we actually met Ray and Eddie, I felt like I knew them both from the many stories Finnegan told while he taught our class in Alexandria, Va. 20 years ago. No one who paid attention in Dan's class (or at the bar afterward) could escape without knowing the personal geography of the old pottery at Winchcombe and its characters. And I know that a version of that story will appear soon in Dan's blog. So I won't risk making mistakes by telling Dan's stories here.

It's enough for me to count Ray as a kind of pottery grandfather. Ray taught Dan, Dan taught me. Before that, Michael Cardew taught Ray and Bernard Leach taught Cardew and so on. I don't claim any special knowledge or talent or skill because I'm at the bottom of that line of succession, but I do like being able to trace some small part of my lineage back that far.

We're a poorer place without master potters Ray Finch and Eddie Hopkins among us.