The midwinter holiday is a good time for a to toast absent friends, friends who are distant by miles and celebrating around a hearth away from ours and in the company of other friends or friends we haven't yet met.

And we have a lot of those and would be totally schnockered if we drank a separate toast to each of them -- but you know who you are!

But this year, perhaps more than others, we're also drinking a toast to those friends who are no longer making music in our circle here on earth. We lost too many good voices this year -- Ed Daigle, fine fiddle player and owner of The Fiddler's Fix; Peter "Chalkie" White, Liverpool singer "exiled" in the White Mountains of NH; Barbara Carns, wry wit, laughing soul and singular voice; and Jay Smith, founder of The Press Room (and the Friday night session) in Portsmouth, NH, major supporter of folk music and the arts in Seacoast NH, and possessor of one of the finest voices I've ever had the privilege and joy to sing with.

Here's to the circle of life and the circle of song. Those who've gone before us sing on in our hearts and memory. And the rest of us will keep the rafters ringing in the coming year.

Linn