diff --git a/additional_notes/0.5.5/header.md b/additional_notes/0.5.5/header.md
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+
+*Thu, Dec 12, 2024*
+
+We’re happy to announce the release of napari 0.5.5! (You might have noticed it's been a hot minute since our last release — the team has been busy on the conference circuit (watch [our talk at PyConAU](https://youtu.be/EYmTLGwScBI?si=5SUqxVYuhyAmlD6H)!), defending their PhDs, and more! We are now back to our regularly-scheduled programming. 😂
+
+napari is a fast, interactive, multi-dimensional image viewer for Python. It’s designed for exploring, annotating, and analyzing multi-dimensional images. It’s built on Qt (for the GUI), VisPy (for performant GPU-based rendering), and the scientific Python stack (NumPy, SciPy, and friends).
+
+For more information, examples, and documentation, please visit our website: https://napari.org/
diff --git a/additional_notes/0.5.5/highlights.md b/additional_notes/0.5.5/highlights.md
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+This release continues the 0.5 tradition of churning out the bug fixes and
+enhancements, with 24 pull requests total in that category. If you are a user
+of oblique plane rendering, you'll appreciate
+[#7422](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7422), which fixes the plane
+calculation when data is anisotropic.
+
+And, did you have a hole in your heart where high-quality 3D labels rendering
+should have been? Check out
+[#7431](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7431), in which [Ashley
+Anderson](https://github.com/aganders3) has (again) improved the quality of 3D
+labels by filling the (apparent, but fictional) holes in labels at the borders
+of a volume. Before/after gif:
+
+![movie showing before and after of labels rendering at the borders of a
+volume](https://github.com/user-attachments/assets/728505be-d212-417b-a29e-7228761ffed3)
+
+Additionally, [Grzegorz Bokota](https://github.com/Czaki) has again sped up
+launch time for Shapes layers by porting all the edge triangulation code to
+numba ([#7268](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7268)). As part of that
+work he also created a fantastic developer example explaining how the edge
+triangulation works, which you can find at
+[examples/dev/triangle_edge.py](https://github.com/napari/napari/blob/b2edccd6e40e04467ccfeec0257c2160783f7187/examples/dev/triangle_edge.py).
+Give it a read and a play if you want to peek under the hood of the Shapes
+layer!
+
+```{raw} html
+<figure>
+  <video width="100%" controls autoplay loop muted playsinline>
+    <source src="../_static/images/triangle-edge.webm" type="video/webm" />
+    <source src="../_static/images/triangle-edge.mp4" type="video/mp4" />
+    <img src="../_static/images/triangle-edge.png"
+      title="Your browser does not support the video tag"
+      alt="napari viewer showing a shapes layer and associated layers depicting the triangulation of the elements of the Shapes layer."
+    >
+  </video>
+</figure>
+```
+
+Did you miss a napari error or warning while reading these notes? We don't
+blame you! Those missed notifications will be a thing of the past with
+[#7220](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7220), which will keep
+notifications open if the napari window is not in focus. Whew!
+
+Finally, for the zarrventurous among you, napari 0.5.5 is ready for zarr v3,
+coming soon to a PyPI near you!
+([#7215](https://github.com/napari/napari/pull/7215)) If you are using or
+testing the zarr 3.0.0 betas, try them with napari! We hope you'll be
+pleasantly surprised. 😊
+
+As always, we thank all the contributors to this napari release and all the
+previous ones! We welcome [Carol Willing](https://github.com/willingc) and
+[Tim Monko](https://github.com/TimMonko) to the list of contributors. Read on
+for all the changes in this version!
+
+Read on for all the changes in this version!