Good grief! How did that happen so fast?

We put this week’s paper together simultaneously with the approach of Christmas, at times with a skeleton holiday crew, and have attempted to keep our minds on our work with all the distractions.

If you are reading this, we succeeded, and now we stop in the quiet to contemplate the quick passage of 2024, from the Jan. 4 issue that opened the year to this issue that ends it … except for the days leading to Jan. 1, 2025, which will be reported in our first paper of the new year.

As a year begins, we assemble our energies, mark the Thursdays on our calendars 1 to 52 (one paper each week), and try to plan for what we know lies ahead.

Surprises always happen along the way and that certainty keeps the newsgathering team alert.

Week by week, month by month, we added to another year of publication of the Gloucester-Mathews Gazette-Journal, established in 1937 by a merger of the much older Gloucester Gazette and Mathews Journal.

We are so grateful to our loyal advertisers and readers for sticking with us, calling us, visiting us, sending us suggestions, complaining to us, and sometimes telling us we are doing our job right. We hope you know that we still have an actual voice answering the phone and putting you through, or taking a message. No “Press 1” or “Press 2,” so far, on our phone options.

To close, we went looking for quotes about the swift passage of time. The author Nathaniel Hawthorn once wrote that “Time flies over us, but leaves its shadow behind.”

He nailed it. Our readers have celebrated family achievements, mourned those who departed, put up with chaotic national politics, struggled with health or economic uncertainties, and generally endured gracefully as Americans do, generation after generation. The time has gone, and left its shadows of memories.

So, it is time to turn the page, break out the new calendar, and start numbering the Thursdays of 2025 from 1 to 52.

Please keep in touch with us as 2025 opens. We are here to fulfill our motto as “Your Hometown Newspaper.”

We can hope for a Happy New Year to all.