🎆 January: There's glitter on the floor after the party...

The First Newsletter of 2025!

Jan 05, 2025

Dear Reader,

“…Girls carrying their shoes down in the lobby
Candle wax and Polaroids on the hardwood floor
You and me from the night before”

Happy New Year! We’re 5 days into 2025 - are you ready for it?!

The new year feels like “a fresh page on the desk”, waiting to be written - a new chapter ready to unfold. But after December’s whirlwind, January always seems to sneaks up on me, leaving me feeling like I’m playing catch-up 🙈. So this month, I’m pausing to reflect on 2024 and reset for the year ahead. There are so many lyrics in Taylor’s songs reminding us to embrace new beginnings - I can’t wait to see what 2025 will bring, and to share in all the Swiftie fun with you this year! Here’s an email full of some inspo to kick off the year.

In this newsletter you’ll find:

🗓️ Swiftie January Dates - important dates to keep track of this month, including January anniversaries, Swift family birthdays, and the last Chiefs game of the regular season (before the playoffs begin)
✨ January Swiftie Playlist - a playlist of new beginnings
🎧 Mashup of 2024 Memories - a mashup to help reflect and hold onto the memories from 2024
🥯 Featured Recipe for the month - “Welcome to New York” 1989 Bagels
🎥 Decoding The Tortured Poets Department: A Series - kicking off a new series on my YouTube channel!
🫶 Upcoming Dear Reader Newsletters - emails to look out for this month

Swiftie January Dates

Our first Swiftie Calendar of the year is filled with a variety of fun events! We’ve got some great musical anniversaries - of both albums and singles. There’s also some Swift family birthdays to celebrate. Andrea Swift, affectionately known as “Mama Swift”, has her birthday on the 10th. And Olivia Benson’s birthday is on the 23rd!

Today the Chiefs are playing their final game of the regular football season. They’ve been doing amazing this season, pulling out some heart-stopping wins, and are going into the play-offs as the top seed! So it’s likely that some of the top players might be sitting out for this final game to rest up for the play-offs. I’m keeping my hopes up for another Super Bowl showing next month!

January 2025 Swiftie Playlist

I’m so excited to share this first playlist of the new year with you! Making Swiftie playlists has become one of my favorite things - I love spending time picking a theme, and then going through Taylor’s discography to select 13 songs to serve as a soundtrack for the month.

I compiled all of my monthly playlists last year into one blog post - you can check it out here if you’d like to! I’m looking forward to re-designing and creating new playlists to fit the new year and all of its happenings.

My theme for my January 2025 Swiftie Playlist is new beginnings - I think it’s the best way to kick off a new year. We start by meeting at midnight, and then flow right into “New Year’s Day” and “The Very First Night”. Each song then features its own new beginning.

I also love the bookended lyrics from “New Year’s Day” to “The Manuscript”: “don’t read the last page” to “now and then I re-read the manuscript”. I don’t know about you, but “The Manuscript” has been top of mind for me ever since the final Eras Tour show. I debated whether to save it for an end-of-the-year December playlist, but I like the idea of starting the new year with the sentiment that, now, the story is ours 🥹

You can listen on Spotify, Apple Music, Amazon, and YouTube, with clean version on Spotify and Apple Music!

Featured Mashup: 2024 Memories

Last month I created a mashup for the final night of the Eras Tour, with “You’re On Your Own, Kid”, “New Year’s Day” and “The Manuscript”. Taylor sang 2 out of the 3 (she swapped YOYOK for “Long Live”, which was perfection) as her final surprise song on Vancouver N3. I thought the mashup was a beautiful way to showcase memories from 2024. Here’s a link to the mashup in full, and my own 2024 memories. What was your best memory from 2024?

Featured Recipe: Welcome To New York 1989 Bagels

I shared this recipe last year, but it’s one of my absolute favorites so I wanted to share it again! I always associate New Year’s Day with the song “Welcome to New York” - how about you? I think it’s because I have such vivid memories of watching Taylor opening her New Year’s Rockin’ Eve performance in 2015 with it. It must’ve been so meaningful for her to perform it during her 1989 era, in the heart of New York City as we all waited for the ball to drop and begin the new year.

New York bagels are a staple of the city, right? So I took my classic sourdough discard bagel recipe (which I make all the time, I baked up a batch just this morning!), but added a fun twist - shaping them into the numbers 1989.

Here’s the recipe for these sourdough “Welcome to New York” bagels on my blog. Plus I put together a YouTube video showing you the process of how I made them too!

Decoding The Tortured Poets Department: A Series

This month I am super excited to finally kick off a series that I have been wanting to get going on my YouTube channel for ages - Decoding The Tortured Poets Department! We’re going to go on a little adventure through Taylor Swift’s latest album, one track at a time. Leading up to the Grammy’s on February 2nd, we’ll cover tracks 1-16 of TTPD, chatting about the lyrics, making connections to Taylor’s larger discography, and looking at different musical elements that elevate each track. I can’t wait to get this series going! You can check out my intro video here, and tomorrow we’ll cover the opening track of the album, “Fortnight”.

Upcoming Dear Reader Newsletters

Jan 8 (paid) - Eras Tour Roundup: Vancouver - After each city’s Eras Tour shows, I’ve sent out an email rounding up all the highlights. But last month I was sending out my 13 Days of Swiftmas emails, and then we got into the holidays, so I still have one final update to finish out the series - we can reminisce about those final shows in Vancouver a month after they happened!
Jan 13 (free) - This newsletter will cover either 2024 highlights or Eras Tour highlights, which would you rather see?
Jan 22 (paid) - A bonus email for paid subscribers!

Thanks for reading this January issue of Dear Reader! I’m excited to see what will come in the new year, and to share in the fun with you - until the next newsletter…

Hold on to the memories (they will hold on to you),

Bekah

🎶 Can I Ask You a Question? 🎶

✨ What was your best memory from 2024?
🎆 What are you most excited about happening in January?
💌 What would you like to see covered in the next newsletter: 2024 highlights or Eras Tour highlights?

Dear Reader