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G-I-R-L-S-C-A-N-P, it's Girls' Camp.

Hello, everyone, and welcome to the Girls' Camp podcast.

I'm your host, Haley Rawl, And if you are navigating a faith deconstruction to,

or simply fascinated in faith deconstruction journeys in Mormonism, specifically and religion

generally, then you are in the right place. Happy New Year. Kind of fun that girls camp this year,

we had a girls camp Wednesday for Christmas and now for the first day of

2025. What I have in store for today is a 2024 wrapped episode where I am going to talk about my

favorites and least favorites of 2024. We're talking about books, movies, music,

and I'm also going to end on some lessons learned last year. I hope you had a good

Christmas if you celebrate. I actually was talking about this a bit on Instagram,

but I have just realized that I get something that I have hereby dubbed

the Christmas blues. And I've talked about this around birthdays because I always get the

birthday blues. No matter how well I prepare and try and adjust expectations, I always end up crying either on my birthday,

the day before, the day after. And I think it's just a matter of expectations and a lot of

buildup and anticipation for something that it kind of inevitably feels a little bit disappointing.

And that happens for me on Christmas as well.

This Christmas, I feel really lucky. Like I don't even want to be like, oh, I was sad on Christmas.

I feel really lucky. We had a beautiful Christmas, a lovely day. We're on great terms with our families.

We got to spend time with my family and with Bentley's family. All that to say, I feel very fortunate to have had the Christmas I had,

but I did find myself in the afternoon starting to feel a little bit of Christmas blues,

just feeling like there was a lot of anticipation and build up and I think it is a common sentiment

...