I came home and then mostly finished the wrapping. There are only a few small items left to do. The sibling presents (minus the 15-year-old’s since he ordered online for delivery today or tomorrow) are under the real, more informal tree (my kids call this the “tree of the people.”). The family presents for Christmas day are under the “fancy tree”  (the fake one with all white/silver/gold lighting and ornaments). My extended family’s presents are in my office, to be taken out when they show up this weekend.

I’m thinking maybe next year a goal could be to finish more of the shopping earlier. I start to feel more relaxed about Christmas when everything is procured and wrapped. So if this was done at Thanksgiving, December could mostly be about experiences.

Easier said than done of course, as people change their minds about their Christmas lists, and there are more gift-oriented items on sale by December. But something to think about.

In the meantime, here is a currently-unnamed sonnet. Looking for something catchy as a title!

Before the stars, before the planets set
into their orbits, which define a day
and year, then what was time? The alphabet
came after words, one could still chance to say

“I love you” never knowing what was “v”
or “l” or what it meant to write a thought.
These constructs come after the thing, we see
our rules imposed on things existing not

because of rules — and yet, how good to know
that if we say we’ll meet at 3 p.m.
at the appointed point of spin we’ll go
to our shared spot on earth and on a whim

we’ll write each other notes, sweet nothings, such —
these lines that mean so little and so much.

On Saturday I got up bright and early to drive my eldest to the SAT (NOT on anyone’s holiday fun list, but hey…). He didn’t want to deal with the stress of getting there and parking (it wasn’t at our local high schools) so I took him. I don’t know that he was thrilled with how it went but this is definitely the last time he will take it, so at least there is that!

After, I drove downtown for my dress rehearsal for the Choral Arts Philadelphia carols concert. This is the choir I am singing the Bach B-Minor mass with later this month, but they turned out to have two concerts this cycle, so this was a bonus to get to sing with them for another show. We ran through the numbers with our flute, bassoon, and organ musicians, took a break (I got to explore Rittenhouse Square a bit) and then we performed to a full Holy Trinity Church (apparently 500+ tickets sold). I really really enjoyed this (someone who was in the audience told me I looked like I was having a really good time). The choir’s blend is fantastic. Now I am really excited for Bach!

Sunday was church as usual and then my daughter and I drove to New Jersey to my parents’ apartment where we did a cookie baking extravaganza. We’d made the dough before hand for gingerbread men, so we rolled those out and baked those, then did sugar cookies (my mom had made the dough for those). We ended with many, many cookies so we’ll be working our way through those for a while. While we were waiting for the cookies to cool (to frost) my mom and daughter played something of a heated game of Scrabble, and we helped decorate their tabletop tree.

Now it’s back to work today, but on my list is triaging presents — seeing what we have and what we still need. We’re at that stage in December where there are piles of boxes in my office and I haven’t opened them all, meaning no doubt some random household items like toothpaste are in the Amazon boxes too and I just haven’t found them. It’s feeling a little disorganized, so I want to be on top of it. Then, hopefully, I will be more relaxed about the season…

In other news: I’m cranking along on the manuscript of Big Time, my next book. I’m working on a chapter on being “open to serendipity” — elaborating on an idea I’ve mentioned before that open space invites opportunity into one’s life in a way a cluttered calendar can’t. I know that some of my biggest opportunities have come because I followed a random thread, or responded to an email that might have led to something…but might not have. It’s helpful to build a schedule where at least some randomness can reach you. Anyway, I am always looking for stories of something serendipitous that has happened because of following a random thread. As always you can email me laura at laura vanderkam dot com.

I am also finalizing my 2025 goals list — we record this episode of Best of Both Worlds ahead of time so I try to lock it in…still noodling on the year-long project!!

*Getting together with friends for breakfast and coffee and hearing from more far-flung people.

*Going out for Mexican food (a margarita! guacamole!) with my family. They gave me miniature accessories for my miniature kitchen, and some puzzles.

*Hearing my church choir sing Happy Birthday at rehearsal — pitched very very high as part of the warm-up. I will never hear it sung that high at a birthday party!

* The birthday thread on our Patreon page! SHU asked people to post something they’d learned from me and it is making me feel many warm fuzzies to know my catchphrases are going through people’s heads!

* I’m headed to Longwood Gardens with my husband this weekend to see the lights and Christmas displays.

So, lots of good stuff. As for content, the Before Breakfast podcast suggested people “Plan a Monday adventure” and “Go in search of lost time.” As the longer episode, I did a time makeover of a Before Breakfast listener named Haley, talking about some various things she tried in her life and how they worked.

Over at Vanderhacks, my Substack newsletter, I discussed how to make time for speculative projects in a post called “Put big dreams first.” Behind the paywall I had tips on “How to make virtual events more engaging,” and ideas on “How to enjoy your birthday as an adult.”

Finally, here’s a sonnet, called “Bus stop.”

Four weeks before the solstice, and the sky
is full of shadows, lengthened on the street.
The school bus stops, the children shout and try
to stop the boy from racing off. His feet

are pushing out his shoes, his elbows taut,
his eyelashes are tangled and his hair
is rumpled. See, he reaches — soon he’s caught
a single yellow leaf. The autumn air

is chilled with wind, then warm in setting sun,
this moment in between when all is light.
So why should we be sad? The boy will run,
and any thoughts of darkness take to flight

like squawking birds, against the golden gleam
of afternoon, of joy that’s like a dream.

The past few days, though, I’ve been experimenting with a treadmill workout that is slightly less boring — and gets me to do some strength training too. What I do is run for 3 minute stretches on the treadmill, then pop off and go do some sort of resistance exercises or weights (we have a dumbbell set, bands, and an old weight machine near the treadmill). I run about 2 miles, total, spread out over these three minute stretches. I set the pace a little higher than I might because, hey, it’s only 3 minutes at a time. And since I’m doing something different every few minutes it doesn’t feel quite so tedious.

If you hit the treadmill in winter, how do you make it less boring?

Anyway, I hosted Thanksgiving this year, so much of Thursday was filled with cooking. My sister-in-law who makes the magnificent rolls was not with us this time, but my little brother made some sourdough rolls that were different but also excellent, so it was all good. He and his wife stayed overnight, and later in the evening we broke out some ice wine from the wine collection we got with the house (the previous owner was downsizing significantly, and also didn’t really drink, so it was a reasonable thing to throw in). My husband and I aren’t big wine drinkers either, so when we have parties we go down there and find something random. It was ice wine from Virginia this time. It was actually good!

On Friday we got our (live) Christmas tree in the morning from the local fire station’s fundraiser. Then, shortly after we got it into the stand, it was time for Sarah and her family to visit, so their kids helped decorate the tree (I checked to make sure this wasn’t problematic; I was assured it was fine). Then we did gingerbread houses and my husband made his oyster soup for the adults. Yum!

My husband and the two older boys then took off for Texas — they went to the Texas/Texas A&M game in College Station. Alas, the game did not go the way my Aggie husband was hoping, but they had a good time visiting the old haunts, including his childhood house (they know the people who bought it) — which was remarkably not that changed.

Meanwhile, I was entertaining the younger three. On Saturday, when I had some babysitting hours for the littlest, I took the next two oldest to the Brandywine River Museum of Art to see the holiday train exhibit, the critter tree, and the dollhouse. We drove 45 minutes to only be there 30 minutes, and I didn’t actually get to see any of the art, but hey. The kids were happy with this accelerated version of a museum visit, especially when we stopped at Wawa and then Starbucks on the way home. (I also had a really good time doing art with these two after the 4-year-old went to bed — with five kids it’s often fun to have different combinations of kids at different points and see how things play out…)

Given that my husband and older two sons (i.e. the people who will eat real food) were gone, I was really on my own for getting through the leftovers. I ate five straight meals of leftover turkey this weekend. I was also running the dishwasher multiple times per day until the kitchen was finally clean (I still haven’t dealt with the placemats in the dining room…on the list…). But I came up with a creative way to use the rest of the cranberries: Cranberry cookies! There’s a recipe on the back of the children’s book Cranberry Christmas, so we made that. There’s a lot of sugar, but it’s balanced out by the tart cranberries.

I did a lot of online shopping and I’m happy to report that a lot of the kid stuff is taken care of. There is more to be done still, but I’m feeling a bit more like there is a plan. I’ll probably wind up taking a half day Wednesday to go to the stores when they’re a little emptier. There are some upsides to self-employment…

I didn’t do a content round-up last week, but a few to check out:

At the Before Breakfast podcast I interviewed Joel and Matt! The hosts of the “How to Money” podcast came on to talk about staying financially sane over the holidays. For the shorter episodes, I suggested that you “Text your response” — even if you’re not sending holiday cards you can participate in the cheer. I also gave my number one tip for more peaceful travel: “Be ready to block out the world.” It can be frustrating to be in a hotel by the elevator or ice maker, or in a train car with someone who wants to share their phone conversation with the world. But as long as you have the power to block out the world, sound-wise, you can be much more calm. Of course if you are traveling with small kids and can’t block out the world, this is a different matter, but…

At Vanderhacks (my Substack newsletter) I reminded people that “All magic is just labor, hidden well.” I noted that “You have as much time today as you’ll ever have.” Then there’s the insight that “You can try again.” There are many reasons things don’t work the first time, and sometimes the answer is not that the thing is a bad idea! Please consider a free or paid subscription, and thanks for reading!

Those things are not going on the official List, though, because this year the List is specifically about things I find fun! Here’s what we will do.

See Luminature at the Philadelphia Zoo. I’ll take the two little boys on the night the big kids are going to see Wicked. These lights are pretty and, more importantly, only about 20 minutes from the house. This will kick off the holiday festivities for me!

Get Christmas lights professionally installed. This is already done— we have several trees wrapped with lights. It’s fun to see them come on as darkness falls. Also fun: the crew will come get them and take them down in January. Our house manager is putting up the official “fancy tree” this week — the artificial one with matching ornaments. I’m hoping for candles in the window soon.

Attend the Pentatonix concert. This was a last-minute addition to the list, but I got tickets and am bringing my oldest to go see their Christmas repertoire.

Host Thanksgiving. A few members of my extended family will be joining us. I also plan to run a turkey trot 5k that morning. My 15-year-old is signed up to run it, as is SHU (she is visiting her family, who live near me, for Thanksgiving)! They will both be running far faster than me. At least I can say hello at the start and the end. My sister-in-law who makes the fabulous rolls turns out to have other Thanksgiving plans this year so we’ll need to come up with a substitute.

Visit Longwood Gardens. My husband and I plan to do this as a date night to celebrate my birthday. I feel like the kids always rush me through the pretty decorations. So this time we are not bringing the kids! But we might go some other time with the kids. I bought the Longwood membership where you don’t have to make reservations, and A Longwood Christmas is almost completely sold out, so I feel like I have the hot ticket here…

Sing in many Christmas concerts. I’m singing a concert of carols with Choral Arts Philadelphia, and then also doing a service of lessons and carols with my church choir. I’ll sing in the Christmas Eve service with my church choir and then in the New Year’s Eve performance of Bach’s B-Minor mass with Choral Arts. Singing the B-Minor mass has been on my bucket list for years so I’m really excited about this.

Do a cookie baking extravaganza. My daughter and I are likely heading over to my mom’s house to do this. Fake butter will be involved! I think we might be able to make three types of cookies in an afternoon.

Have breakfast with Santa. I want to do this, and my daughter really wanted to do this, so we booked a breakfast for seven at an area department store. We have been instructed (by said daughter) to dress up this time.

Watch the Nutcracker. I think only the oldest kid wants to do this with me, but I always like the music and the dancing. I have not purchased tickets yet as finding a time is challenging (See: everything else on the schedule) but my husband and I are theoretically having a December calendar meeting tonight. Stay tuned.

See the Rockettes in NYC. We bought tickets to bring all seven of us this year! We’ll also go out to dinner in New York afterwards (reservation for 7 = made), and see the Rockefeller Center tree.

Watch kids in the Christmas pageant. Only 2 are performing this year, but that’s fine. I will miss this when no one wants to do it anymore!

Get matching family pajamas. We’ve ordered pajama sets from Pajamagram for the last 5 years, but the problem with doing that is we’ve kind of exhausted their inventory of pajamas we like. So this year my daughter chose a basic red and black pattern and we bought pairs from a few different vendors on Amazon. This is another tradition that I’m not sure will last forever. There is a lot of grumbling. But I think we can squeeze out another year or two.

Read Christmas stories with the 4-year-old. He’s been a bit of a beast at bedtime lately. But we do enjoy reading together. I’m heavily pushing the Christmas stories to him in between the Spiderman books that he wants me to read to him. I like Christmas Farm, Pick a Pine Tree, Cranberry Christmas, Apple Tree Christmas, Christmas Day in the Morning, 5 Sleeps Until Christmas, The Night Before the Night Before Christmas, How Santa Got His Job, The Christmas Wish, and others. The Grinch is fun to read maybe twice but he kind of likes to read that one a lot.

Do the Lego Christmas scene and some Christmas puzzles. I’ll make the North Pole Lego post office (this year’s scene) with the 15-year-old (who is indulging me) and the 13-year-old (who probably is too). I just finished the holiday carolers scene puzzle from White Mountain that a lovely BLP Live participant gave me. I’ll clear the dining room table for Thanksgiving and then even if December is short there will be time for a few more puzzles before the holidays.

Enjoy myself. If you are your family’s chief magic maker you know that this actually does need to go on the list as a reminder. (As the line from last year’s Christmas sonnet goes, “All magic is just labor, hidden well.”)

What’s on your holiday fun list?

But there was also a fair amount of open time — some of which I didn’t have the 4-year-old for. So I kept thinking that I should be getting ahead on all the stuff for the holidays. I know December is about to hit like a big storm, and I’m thinking that I should be stocking up on metaphorical pop-tarts and bottled water. I made and ordered our Christmas card. The 13-year-old picked out family pajamas and ordered them. She and I also started on the Christmas Lego set! I mostly have the holiday fun list (coming later this week) and I worked on choosing dates for anything that needs an assigned date. If something is on the list without a date there’s a big chance it won’t happen as — guess what! — the holiday season is really short this year. We come out of Thanksgiving weekend and it’s already December. There are only 3 December Saturdays before Christmas this year. The gift shopping will be something and that is no where near started but it will happen eventually. And I shouldn’t rush through Thanksgiving as there is a lot of fun happening with that too…

Anyway! Perhaps I am not very good at relaxing. I did spend a bit of time working on my puzzle. And a lot of time practicing music for 3 upcoming concerts before New Year’s Day. Also, there are three kid music concerts too in December…

In the meantime, this might be the last of the autumnal sonnets, with a working title of “Past Peak”:

November afternoon, tonight the rain —
for now the ashen clouds are gray and low;
the contrast with the leaves makes things mundane
seem holy, with the forest bright, aglow.

A maple’s scarlet in the cedar trees;
a gingko, golden, shakes a few leaves loose,
undressing just a bit with every breeze,
and by the woods there stands a single spruce

as sentry, soon the only color left
in three days time when all will fade to brown.
We linger in this moment, till bereft
of hue the trees must start to hunker down.

Still there’s this afternoon — these precious days.
Before it withers, all the world’s ablaze.

Yesterday we had a crew here installing lights on the trees. I’d decided to do  professional Christmas lights installation this year, and so it will be festive to look out the window and see the trees all wrapped in lights. I forgot to take a picture last night so unfortunately that isn’t an accompanying photo for this post, but hey. We’ve started working on scheduling in parts of the holiday fun list. It’s going to be a tight year because Thanksgiving is so late. We did buy 7 tickets to the Rockettes! And the breakfast-with-Santa tickets are purchased. Still trying to figure out when the Nutcracker and Longwood Gardens are happening…

(I’ll probably publish that list next week.)

In the meantime, here’s this week’s content round-up.

The Before Breakfast podcast interview featured Charles Duhigg, author of Supercommunicators, and The Power of Habit. We talked having better conversations and his own productivity tips. In the shorter episodes, I suggested that we “Don’t consent and resent” (it might be better to just say no!) and I asked “What’s on your holiday fun list?”

The Vanderhacks newsletter suggested that people “Set relationship goals” and “Reduce chores, don’t reschedule them.” I suggested that we can serve the people around us by being a calming force — “Be the eye of the storm.” Behind the paywall, I suggested “A little way to take your reading up a notch.” The Vanderhacks newsletter turns one later this month. I’ve had a lot of fun doing it, and hope to grow this newsletter over the next year. Please consider a free or paid subscription!

The Best of Both Worlds podcast featured an interview with Gabrielle Blair (the Design Mom). Over at our Patreon community, we’ve been discussing suggestions for filling the time from 5-8 p.m. when it’s dark and cold outside. We also — believe it or not — had a camp question already. Is it better to put kids in one day camp for the whole summer, or to curate different camps on different topics? There are arguments for both. Please come join the discussion! Membership is $9/month. We’ll have our next Zoom meet-up on November 26th to discuss holiday planning.

Finally, a sonnet, called “The coat.”

A London park, October, and the leaves
are bright amid the city’s settled gray.
Two people walk, our narrator perceives
that they are lovers, new ones, as they stray

from sidewalks we take notice of her coat:
a brilliant white, as shiny as their bond.
Would travel mar its luster? She might float
that thought, but then her roommate might respond

that no, you need to wear it — on this trip.
This is the girl that fell short on the rent.
Another mindset, but, my friends, we skip
two decades forward, care cannot prevent

a coat from turning beige. But memory’s true —
that coat is London, all still bright and new.

I ran the Frostbite 5-miler, and while my time was not spectacular (10:57 min/miles) it wasn’t as bad as I thought it was in the middle. I also went (by myself!) to a chamber orchestra concert in downtown Philadelphia on Sunday afternoon. Some other combinations of people went to a movie on Friday night. We had some friends over at one point, there was night skiing, the 14-year-old got to meet up with friends at the mall AND he cashed in his Christmas present to go see Wicked in NYC. He and I got tickets, and then my husband and two other older children came in to go see the American Museum of Natural History. We ate lunch at the Carnegie Diner and did a lot of reminiscing as we walked through Central Park. Wicked was pretty fun — a good Broadway musical to bring kids to. I forget how close the city is (1 hour and 50 minutes with no traffic, which there really wasn’t on the way there). Now that some of the kids are older we should probably go in more often.

But perhaps not with the toddler. My most vivid memory of the weekend may be taking my 2-year-old to the grocery store on Saturday. I have five kids, so I’ve had a reasonable number of grocery-store-with-toddler experiences, but this one was one for the books. I’m talking throwing bottles of mustard off the shelves, lying down in the middle of the aisle and screaming. Wow! I just had to laugh because it was so ridiculous.

Photo: From lunch at the Carnegie Diner & Cafe

It’s a local move, and we don’t have to be out of the house immediately, so nothing is particularly high stakes. We can come back and get stuff. I’m sure we will. But still — it is a lot of moving parts.

I spent the past week feeling a lot of nostalgia as I took things down from the walls and packed up toys and plants and loose items that would be hard to move.

If the nostalgia was robust, I’m not sure the progress was. Looking back, this was probably not the most efficient process. We split up the family for the post Christmas week. My husband took the four older kids on a ski trip and I stayed home with the toddler (since I don’t really ski and he doesn’t yet — so we’d just be hanging out in a rental house rather than our own house, which has his familiar crib and toys…). I had some childcare, and I used that time to take bins of stuff over to the new house. But I am only so fast, and I am one person. Plus when I did have the toddler with me, moving stuff was painfully slow. Once the rest of the family came home, my husband and I could both load stuff in cars, and the teen/pre-teen children could carry things and unload them and I made as much progress yesterday as I did during the entire week. Moving turns out to be a team sport.

I am telling myself it will all happen eventually. I did record a few more episodes of Before Breakfast, and I did some revisions on the book. I edited emails for the time-tracking challenge that will run from January 10-16. And I spent a lot of time with the toddler. We played with his new toys, read a lot of stories and (yes) watched a lot of Blippi.

The new house wi-fi is definitely up and running so we’ll have that. We’ll see when the address change gets registered with the school district, though, so bus service is unclear. We may wind up driving for a while. The logistics are making my head spin. Well, one day at a time for the first week or two and then I’m sure we’ll get into the groove.

I did not stay up until midnight on New Year’s Eve. I went to bed around 11:15, but then the toddler woke up howling around 12:45, so I guess I rang it in in my own way…

(Though honestly he’s been pretty good about sleep this week — slept through the night most nights, and not too early in the mornings, and I don’t think that would have happened in a rental house, so I’m feeling good about that.)

We had a belated 2-year-old birthday celebration with the other kids last night. We even had half of an ice cream cake sitting in the freezer so we pulled that out for everyone to have a few bites. The little guy managed to blow out his candle quite well and is getting the concept of opening presents (though he had a lot of help there…all the other children seemed to want to help him!)

I have read about half-way through Twelfth Night in my Shakespeare reading project! I hope anyone who started reading War and Peace has enjoyed the first few chapters….