Transition Time

Over this holiday season, I've been conscious of experiencing many lasts as I contemplate the twins heading off to college next year--the last time I'll slip an ornament, a clementine, and chocolate into each shoe hastily placed before the wood stove on St. Nicholas Eve, the last time we'll trek into the woods as a family to find the perfect Christmas tree, the last time we'll fashion a Yule log menorah from a piece of firewood and invite friends over for latkes and dreidel. While all three kids will likely come home for some period of time around Christmas for many years to come, we'll no doubt let go of most of the small celebrations I've built in over the years to extend the holiday season, dissipate some of the anticipatory build-up of pressure around one big day of greed and gluttony, and focus on non-consumeristic, non-obligatory, non-performative ways of enjoying this time of year. Some of those rites have already gone by the wayside: the boys outgrew the Christmas Book Countdown years ago; they lost interest in the 12 Days of Christmas calendar a while back; and this year I had a book event on the Solstice, so we didn't have our traditional hike and small fire by the river.

It's a funny thing about parenting, how we anticipate, make note of, and remember each first--first clap, first word, first time riding a bike without training wheels--but lasts slip by without notice. Sometimes we don't even realize it was a last until weeks or months or years have passed. When was the last time he said 'vigenar" or "skabetti"? When was the last time I tied his shoes for him? When was the last time I could pick him up? So being aware of lasts as they happen is a strange feeling. It's tinged with both nostalgia and relief--nostalgia for the sweet time in my kids' lives when the holidays were full of magic and relief that I will soon be freed of the effort of keeping that magic alive.

People have been asking me for a while now if it isn't going to be hard to let my youngest two kids go when they head off to college next year, if I dread facing the empty nest. Of course I'll miss my kids, and I'm sure people mean well, but I have to admit to taking umbrage at the question. First, this was the goal of the whole project: to raise competent humans who can launch themselves out of the nest and live their own lives. I'm thrilled for them, and excited to see what this next phase brings. Second, the idea that something essential will be missing from my life with my kids away fails to account for the immense amount of self-sacrifice and physical and emotional labor I put into raising them or consider that maybe I'm exhausted by the effort and due for a break. Finally, the question implies that I *am* my kids, that I don't have an identity outside of "mother" and won't have a raison d'être once they're gone. So forgive me if I respond with a glib statement about being well shot of them as I dust my hands together.

While the time when I get to (more) fully inhabit myself as an individual human being is months in the future, I've been getting a preview of what it will be like to extract myself from the mother identity this week as I've begun recording my dreams and goals for 2023 and beyond. I still have to account for them and their not inconsiderable needs over the next nine months of getting them into and off to college, but after that there's a bit of a blank slate. Thinking about extracting me from them feels a bit like trying to take off a snug jacket with the zipper jammed in the up position. For so many years my goals have had to be either expanded to encompass a family or truncated by the limitations imposed by family life. I'm not sure I even know how to dream big anymore, or what my life will look and feel like next September. I had thought, at one time, that I'd drop the twins off at college and then keep on driving, west in a camper van, to explore deserts and mountains and rivers. But as the time draws nearer, I see that's not an entirely realistic plan. For one thing, I don't even have a camper van. 

2023 will be punctuated, no doubt, by many lasts, many moments of nostalgia and relief, as all three of my kids make big steps toward being their own adult selves. For me, I hope it will be marked by a few firsts, as I fiddle that jammed zipper loose, try new things, and learn to inhabit the post-mom me.

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The Holiday Squeeze

I had to make some adjustments as I figured out—or relearned—how to Christmas while working full time.



We had the added complication this year of M's weekend work and play practice schedule.



Plus the plays and music concerts and other performances to attend ourselves.



We worked around, cut back, and made-do. I let some things drop—St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucia Day, the Winter Solstice hike and fire in the woods.



No one seemed to miss the missing celebrations, and I'm not sure how to take that—be happy that my kids are easy to please or disappointed that our traditions over the years didn't make more of an impression.



We DID host our traditional Hanukkah feast with friends, on the same afternoon we brought in our tree.



C and the boys took charge of decorating said tree, while I prepared latkes, and festooned it with miles of yarn garland from E and Z's finger-knitting days.



It took me until two days before Christmas to finish hanging all our ornaments, the same day I spun like a whirlwind, baking three kinds of cookies and my first-ever yule log cake (Black Forest flavor).



And we went on a traditional family Christmas Eve hike to the river with our guests.



Followed by family and feasting and, of course, round after round of gift-opening.



The greatest gift I received was five full days off to spend doing all of that baking and decorating, and a little last-minute shopping, and, of course, doing what I love best on Christmas: hanging out at home with my kids, watching them enjoy their gifts, nibbling all day on cookies and crackers and cheese, and just being for a little while, with nowhere to go and absolutely nothing we have to do.

I hope you and yours had a wonderful holiday season, too.

Weekend Things ~ Wonderful Life, Bird Count, Hanukkah

We had one of those weekends where everything was happening at once.

M played Bert the Cop in It's a Wonderful Life. I was able to catch two of the four performances, and they were great (don't you love high school plays?). Here he is with George and Ernie, checking out Violet's backside as she struts away across the stage:



Saturday, C and I and E and Z did the Christmas Bird Count. This is the third year in a row and the fourth year overall that we've had the same route in our area. The first time was many years BC (before children), and we both swear we saw snow buntings that year, but we haven't seen them since.

If you want to tag along in spirit, you can watch the video C made of our count:

Sunday, I helped out M's French trip with a bottle drive (lucky kid was at work and didn't have to help me) and then took him Christmas shopping after he got out of work. In the evening, friends came over for our traditional Hanukkah dinner of latkes, gingered beets, and homemade apple sauce. Per tradition, C made a Yule Log Menorah. I think this is the best one yet. Usually the menorah-yule-log gets tossed in the wood stove, but this year C threatened to hide this one and just pretend he made it new next year. I'm okay with that.

They didn't have gelt at the store where I usually buy it, so the kids made do with square chocolates in shiny wrappers. The change of shape didn't seem to slow down their dreidel playing (or chocolate eating) at all, and when the chocolates were gone, they played with nuts.



To infuse an educational element into our festivities, we watched The Rugrats Chanukkah special. It was silly but surprisingly informative and the big kids didn't complain about watching a cartoon.

Best of the Blog ~ Holiday Traditions

Traditions give a comforting sense of rhythm and repetition to days and years. They give us things to look forward to, trigger memories, and are measuring sticks by which we chart our family's changes over the years. They can also be repetitive, rote, and boring. Do we have to do that again? I'm feeling a bit of the latter this year, which either means it's time for these kids to grow up and move out already, or it's time to mix things up and try something new. Before I figure out what that will be, here's a little stroll down some of our favorite holiday traditions.

Christmas Book Countdown

With much bigger boys, this will be the first December in many years that we don't count down the days to Christmas by unwrapping and reading a holiday book (or two or three) each evening before bed. But for all the years it lasted, the Christmas Book Countdown was one of our favorite traditions. (This post tells gives the low-down on the tradition and also includes links to the creation of the book crate and some of our seasonal favorite reads).

Getting the Tree

Setting off into the woods to search for and cut the perfect tree is one of my favorite parts of the holiday. We've gotten a tree out of the woods near our house every year since M was a baby and I've been documenting those tree hunts here since 2009. That year, I shared some history on that tradition.  Some years we collected our tree from snowless woods. Then there was the year we came home from picking out a tree from the woods and decided to instead use the tree that had fallen down in our front yard months earlier. Some years, we've had to squeeze getting the tree in between all the other things we have going on; make that many years. And last year, the year we got our 16th tree off this land, I revisited some of those past tree-gettings.

Christmas Cookies

Making—and eating—cookies is, of course, a favorite tradition of everyone around here. I've honed cookie-making to a science, mixing all the dough in one mega-mixing session, and putting it in the fridge or freezer for later cutting. This saves me from having to wash all of the measuring and mixing implements more than once. To avoid contamination, I start with the white dough of sugar cookies, followed by light brown Spekulatius, and finish with the much darker chocolate gingerbread. Sometimes I add other cookies into the mix, like two kinds of shortbread I tried last year. Different candies make appearances now and then, including the perennial and always improving peppermint bark,

Little Holidays
My favorite part of the Christmas season is not Christmas at all, but the other holidays we celebrate in a small way in the weeks leading up. These are low-stress, high reward events, completely divorced from wantiness, greed, and unrealistic expectations.

On December 6, we celebrate St. Nikolaus Day, with a few treats placed in shoes left out the night before: an ornament for the tree, a chocolate, and a clementine. On or around December 13, we celebrate St. Lucia Day with saffron buns.

Sometime during the eight days of Hanukkah, we get together with friends for latkes, applesauce, a few rounds of dreidel, and our traditional Yule log menorah. A few days ago, M said "Did you know most Christian families don't celebrate Hanukkah?" It was a funny statement, but also a perfectly reasonable thing to be surprised by for a kid growing up in an atheist-but-open-minded-and-slightly-pagan household. We don't mind coopting religious celebrations that aren't our own, especially if they involve really good food. And I'd rather have a latke with sour cream than turkey or ham (or whatever the traditional American Christmas dinner is these days) any day.

For the solstice, we decorate our front yard spruce tree with yummy treats for the birds and, weather permitting, go out for a nighttime trek to the river, where we build a small fire and enjoy being outside at night in winter—a rare event.

Twelve Days of Christmas

Several years ago, I started combatting the day-after-Christmas letdown by keeping the festivities going for twelve more days. Our celebrations are simple: A Twelve Days of Christmas calendar (kind of the anti-Advent calendar); a ring of twelve candles which we light each night while we sing a holiday carol or two, removing one candle each night as we count down to twelve; and one final gift dropped in shoes placed by the fire on the last night of Christmas.

After all that celebrating (not to mention actual Christmas, which involves a lot of contortions with C's extended family plus long-distance Christmasing with my family in Colorado), we are usually ready to settle into a long, quiet winter.

Weekend Things ~ Regroup

We divided our weekend between quiet but productive at-home time and social events with friends. I spent all of Saturday un-Christmas-ing the house. Everyone else in the house is a lot less enthusiastic about taking down the decorations than putting them up (and, let's face it, they're only lukewarm about the decorating), although C did jump in to help in order to get some footage for his vlog. His method of putting away ornaments, though, is to jumble them in a box for me to sort out later, so I sent him away in short order.





In the evening we joined friends for their annual peace party ("Give Peas a Chance" at which split pea soup and other green legume-based dishes and snacks are served liberally). It felt good to be among a crowd of people who genuinely yearn for peace, though it was difficult to keep the conversations from nose-diving down depressing paths.



Sunday we returned our Christmas tree to the woods. C was reminiscing about how, when he was a kid, they would dismember and burn their Christmas tree, right there in the living room, which to me just sounds barbaric. After all it's done for us, lifting our spirits and brightening home in darkest winter, to chop it up and set it on fire is a horrifying thought.


So we take it back to the woods, where it can provide shelter for critters and, eventually nourish the soil for other little trees. We somehow found the very stump form which we'd cut our tree, and could see, from the discrepancy in trunk diameter between our tree's base and the stump, how very much we'd had to take off the bottom to fit it in the house. Or maybe it shrank.



Sunday evening we had a belated Hanukkah feast with friends. This year I baked the latkes, which made them slightly less work and almost as good as fried (and a lot lower calorie, which means we could eat more of them). While clearing away the Christmas trappings and preparing for guests, I tidied a few corners of the house, a fresh start for the new year. When I was rearranging our ornament storage in the basement, I found a box of knickknacks and photos that have been put away since at least last Christmas. I took them out, dusted them off, and found a frame for one of the family photos Meryl took of us last summer to add to the collection.

I also tidied up the little corner of our living room where I keep my desk. I've been on a perennial quest to make this area work for me (see here, here, here, and here), and while I have often longed for more space, and more private space, and space that's not the first thing you see when you walk into our house, I'm right now kind of happy with my little setup.

I have everything I need for my projects right here—nature journaling and art supplies in the right-hand drawer of the desk, and tucked alongside the tall cabinet to the left, miscellaneous office supplies (and a fair amount of junk that should probably be dealt with) in the left-hand drawer. My field guides and naturalist supplies in and on the little bookshelf, yoga mats, and block, foam roller and acupressure massage mat, and yoga books between the cabinet and the bookcase. In the large basket, I keep magazines I need to read, my binoculars, and other supplies of that nature. One small basket holds my current knitting project. The other I call my "wellness basket." It holds my yoga strap, eye pillows, foot massage balls, hand cream, and other small objects related to health and fitness (the tennis balls are not for playing tennis—they're for making a massager whenever I get around to finding an old sock).

On top of my desk, a lamp, some pens and pencils, the calendar where I record daily weather events and high/low temps, a little stack of things I need or want to do, along with my nature journal and bullet journal (and a little gift bag full of thank-you notes which I swear to god I will finish writing tonight). I also found in the basement an electronic frame, which I used to keep in my office. I rustled up a memory card and have it set up to do a slideshow of our Colorado Trail photos.

I have not once sat at a desk to work since I left my 9-5 job (usually I sit on the sofa), but today, I actually sat here and wrote, edited and did this post! It's like there's something about a clean and tidy space that makes it easier to concentrate.

Weekend Things ~ Christmukkah

First: More pictures of my new kitchen shelves. I was finally home when the lovely afternoon light was shining on them this weekend and I had to take more pictures. What can I say? I'm in love.

(And I'm extra in love with this totally adorable little strawberry pitcher.)

Okay, onto the weekend. We had a very busy Christmas activity-filled weekend, starting with a performance of Annie at M's high school Friday night and wrapping up with The Nutcracker Sunday afternoon. In-between we got our Christmas tree.

At around 55 degrees F, it was very much not Christmas-tree-getting weather. We've had a few snowless tree-getting expeditions, but never one so warm as this.

I found myself wandering around, taking pictures,

And forgetting what our mission was.

But C kept us on track and found us this nice little tree.

We said our traditional words of thanks, sang "O Christmas Tree," and the boys took turns sawing through the trunk.

When we got home, C and I partially decorated it while the boys played outside for hours--such a treat this time of year. Then we set aside the Christmas decorating and prepared latkes and gingered beets and fresh, hot applesauce for a Hanukkah dinner with friends. We started celebrating Hanukkah a few years ago because I wanted to introduce my kids to different cultures (and because latkes), and it's turned into one of my favorite events of the season--an evening spent with good friends around good food with absolutely no expectations, no giving or getting of gifts, no baggage of Christmas past. No need to worry that the tree is half-decorated, the cookie dough is half-mixed in the fridge, the presents are 1/4 purchased and 0% wrapped. C made our traditional Yule log menorah (this year he found a great branch with a natural hump in the middle), we spun some dreidel, ate some gelt, listened to klezmer music and Adam Sandler, and just generally enjoyed ourselves.

The next morning I snuck out of bed early and put some saffron buns in the oven for St. Lucia Day and we finished decorating the tree.

It's a spindly guy, I suppose, compared to farm-raised trees.

But we managed to fit most of our ornaments onto it, even some glass balls that I don't usually bother with.

Christmas Train ~ Hanukkah ~ Winter Solstice

Our holiday celebrations have been proceeding apace. I think these pre-Christmas holidays--borrowed from cultures and countries around the world and adapted to fit our family, free of dogma and expectations and materialism,with traditions created, remembered, and enhanced year-to-year--are my favorite part of the season. 

I felt good going into the weekend, my Christmas shopping and preparations pretty much done (other than wrapping, which is another tradition: a late night "It's a Wonderful Life" viewing and wrapping party on the 23rd). But now the Christmas anxiety is setting in. Did I buy enough? Too much? C and I have large extended families and several groups of unrelated people to buy for, and it's always a struggle for me to know what is the right way to give--do you put the same amount of money and thought into every single gift for everyone, or match simple with simple and extravagant with extravagant? Sometimes it can feel like an arms race. And then C does his shopping very last-minute, which leads to other complications--too much stuff for the kids, always, and weird, impulse purchases. He lacks my garbage filter. Or he's just more fun than I am. Maybe both. 

We are hosting three Chrismases at our house over the next week--Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, and Christmas, Observed, on Sunday--but I only have to cook for one of them (Our guests will bring dinner Christmas Eve, C will make brunch Christmas morning and I'll put out finger foods in the afternoon for whoever feels like taking a break from their new toys to eat something--one of my holiday traditions is to not cook on Christmas Day). Our third Christmas will take place Sunday evening. I think I'm most looking forward to the two days in between--time free of work and obligations. I hope to finish knitting the hat that is clearly not going to get done by Christmas, lie on the couch and read a book, build a puzzle with the kids, sit by the fire and sip eggnog. 

Happy holidays, however you celebrate, and happy winter! Can you feel the days getting longer already?