A holiday slow down

how I'm going to start winter

Friday, I took my oldest to the doctor right after everyone else was off to school. He was hilarious, knocking people for having Christmas decorations up in public while singing Christmas carols in the van, which wasn’t public space so it was fine. I dropped him off at school and drove around the corner to the library. I specifically wanted some browsing books: books I could pick up and look through and then set back down quickly. Sometimes, I don’t have time to find my place physically and mentally in a book and read, but I don’t want to be picking up my phone either. I got a stack, including a gardening book, a cookbook, and a biography of Lin-Manuel Miranda, which is not a browsing book at all, but it’s new and I wasn’t going to pass it up.¹

Then I came home, started some laundry, and mixed up some bread dough for our Friendsgiving tomorrow. My life-friend arrived and we walked to the preschool for her youngest daughter’s Thanksgiving performance.² We sat with another woman and as she talked about her life, I invited them both to lunch with their children. We warmed up leftovers and “oven food” and the kids played and the adults talked.³ When they left, the sun had come out and we had plans for an afternoon chocolate drink.

I braided the challah. I emptied the dishwasher, but didn’t load it. I vacuumed the kitchen.

I typed 250 words and it was time to pick up my middle schooler for Thanksgiving break.

Life has felt like this for weeks. Appointments and people needs and parenting have overtaken my days. The news has been heartrending. The sun goes away at 5:15. I wrote in my journal last week that I felt worn down and overstimulated.

Usually that means it’s time to say “no” to a few things and be more particular about where I’m spending my energy. So I’m going to take a little break. We’ll finish the Amos study after the new year. (This might be a great time to catch up?) We’ll go back to weekly Wednesday posts after the new year.

My guess is that some writing will still end up here.⁴ I have some essays I’m working on and a post that really only needs footnotes. But I need to fill up, not just so I can write, but so I can be present for the people in my life.

What are my plans?

• I want to watch obscene amounts of Christmas movies with my kids. I’m going to start with The Muppets Christmas Carol this Friday and I plan to watch it no less than four times this year.

• I’m going to bake: challah bread and chocolate chip cookies with toasted pecans, ciabatta rolls and chocolate cake. My thirteen-year-old is a big baker and he bought a cookie cookbook at his scholastic fair. He’s going to bake his way through it and I will happily be his resource.

• I want to draw, with the kids and on my own. I love a working sketchbook and it’s not something I’ve made time for lately.

• I want to read and flip through my browsing books. I have three library books (including that biography of LMM) and then it’s time to bust out my new copy of The Iliad. I like a bigger reading project in the winter.

• I want to go to bed early. We all know how exhausting parenting toddlers is and truly it is. But however delightful this current stage is—and truly it is delightful—it’s also exhausting. The coaching is completely different, but the seemingly-endless repetition of it is draining.

• I want to hike. We tackled Devil’s Marbleyard yesterday with friends and it is such an accomplishment.⁵

• I’m going to take notes on my reading. Taking notes on my reading is a newly-reengaged practice and I love how much deeper I think about my reading when I do it. It also takes so much time.

• I’m going to finish memorizing this poem by Wendell Berry. I only have a few lines left.

I will be writing and reading, listening to my kids’ winter concerts, and carting them to appointments. We’ll have dinner with friends and watch some more Alone. I’ll clean the house over and over, work on Hebrew and Greek, go to the sermon team meetings at church, go to church, do Christmas shopping. You get the idea.

The holiday season can feel crazy. But I want to opt out of the crazy, especially the part that is only of my own making, as much as I can.

Links

• I have made this specific turkey recipe for four or five years and I’m never going back. It’s so easy and so delicious.

• I love to have Olivia Dean music playing quietly in the background when there are people over. If we’re alone, it might be “Die with a Smile” or The Beatles or Jon Batiste.⁶

• Every single time the bakery around the corner hangs up a sign that they are hiring a baker I have to talk myself out of applying. I have enjoyed this YouTube channel of an actual baker at an inn in New England.

• One of my goals for my upcoming 40s is to section-hike the 500ish miles of the Appalachian Trail that are in Virginia. This podcast about the AT is terrific.

• Lately in novels, I’ve read The Lion Women of Tehran, Klara and the Sun, and Swing Time. I liked them the best in that order, but they were all good.

• Last night, I finished Sense and Sensibility and it deserved its own mention. The book is hilarious. It doesn’t top Jane Eyre (what could?)⁷ but it’s such a great story.

• My thirteen-year-old and I have learned to make a London Fog, mostly from this recipe. It’s one of my favorite drinks.

1. The Creep of Culture: an overview of When Women Were Priests

2. You Get Extra Sisters and Brothers: the church as family

3. Becoming Familiar with Disabilities: my oldest has turned fifteen

What are you saying “no” to during the holiday season?

1. I am a Lin-Manuel Miranda fan. His work is so great.

2. Our families literally do life together. She needs a special title but I don’t know what it is.

3. “Oven food” is what our family calls chicken nuggets, fries, fish sticks. All of the frozen stuff that you simply stuff in the oven is oven food.

4. And I will be writing because I must write.

5. Especially since we had 10 children with us.

6. The boys will appear from nowhere to come sing “Die with a Smile” while dinner is cooking.

7. Maybe Wuthering Heights. Maybe. Which I will reread in December because that’s when you should read it. Sorry, The Iliad. You’ll probably be for 2026.