We Have a Winner

 So last night after Vespers and dinner and story time, I painstakingly wrote down on a sheet of standard white printer paper  the names of all entrants in the Great Castle Rush-the-Season Giveaway. I tore the paper into uniformly-sized slips and folded them up into indistinguishable little wads.

These I placed in my hat -- I am not, by nature, a hat-wearer, but once in a musical about Noah I played Mrs. Japheth and had to sing a three-line solo in the course of which my hat fell off into the imaginary water. I haven't worn the hat since, and we've had four mailing addresses in the time intervening between the last moment of that play and now, yet somehow it has managed to be hanging on the pegs in the hallway which doubles as my office, a.k.a. the nerve center for this blog. Go figure.

So I shook the hat with the little wads of paper in it. Then I shook it some more. Then I carried it into the dining room, which doubles as Aelred's office when he's at home, and I said, "Could you possibly help me do something?"

So it was Aelred, a man of unimpeachable integrity and high-quality Advent meditations, who shut his eyes, waved his hand around in the air above the hat, and then plunged it in, pulling out the winning name.

And the winner is:  VA.

Email me, VA, and we'll take it from there.

Many thanks to all who entered the drawing -- it's fun to know who's out there reading. Please don't be strangers.

And do please visit the monks and check out their many excellent Christmas specials and sets:  mugs, sampler packs, and subscriptions all make excellent gifts for the coffee lovers in your life. I'd love to say something about a certain stocking in my house being heavy with the bean of the Rockies come Christmas morning, but I don't want to give away the surprise.



And naturally, as my friend The Anchoress puts it, coffee purchases through this site do drop a little change in our tip jar, for which we are, as always, very very grateful.