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!

It’s the holiday season, and this week’s Best of Both Worlds talks about how to plan out the next few weeks. We recommend taking a mindful approach of figuring out what everyone truly wants to do — though of course tradition does carry some weight. We talk about what *we* would like to receive as gifts as well!

Please give the episode a listen. We’ll be gathering with our Patreon community at noon (Eastern), today, 11/26, to discuss how to curate a holiday season. If you’d like to join you can go to our Patreon page (if you see this after noon, don’t worry, there’s a recording). We’re also happy to announce that our annual goal-setting workshop will be December 19th (also at noon, eastern) and Sarah will lead us through some goal setting exercises for 2025. That’s always a great one! Membership is $9/month and includes access to our forum, where we have 3-4 discussion threads going each week on issues of work/life.

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?

There is much to be grateful for on this Thanksgiving weekend. On the other hand, I have reached the stage of late pregnancy where everything is just physically uncomfortable. And while reaching this stage of pregnancy is itself a cause for gratitude (hello, I turn 41 this week!) it’s slightly harder to feel that way as I haul my heavy self around. Getting in the car is difficult. Bending over is an unpleasant experience. I get winded going up stairs. This is going to be a long next 6-7* weeks.

So I am just taking it day by day. In the morning: hey, I made it through another night (hopefully not too bad of one…I read or work if I can’t sleep). In the evening: another day in the books! I tend to fall asleep easily, even if I don’t stay asleep, so it’s kind of a treat to nestle into the comfy spot I have carefully constructed from what seems like a fort-worthy number of pillows.

In Off the Clock, I devote a section to how people get themselves through challenging times — more challenging than what I’m facing, but the same lessons apply.

First, know that the time frame is probably limited. Certainly that is the case with pregnancy. All time passes. If you need to stay in a miserable job for 2 years, well, 2 years is 17,520 hours, and you won’t work for all of them. When you can set a reasonable end on the time frame, you can pace yourself through a great many things.

Second, find little moments to enjoy as you can. I don’t always feel terrible. Even if my physical body is a mess there are some really cool things going on professionally and personally in my life. And sometimes there are good moments that are enjoyable precisely because of their contrast with the crummy situation. I loved Tough Mudder champion and ultrarunner Amelia Boone’s description (in Off the Clock) of seeing the sun rise after she’d been out all night on a freezing obstacle course. It was just a normal wintry sunrise, and someone out driving on the highway would have thought nothing of it. But there in the cold morning, Boone was elated. She had earned that dawn.

In any case, I’m trying to enjoy what I can of the holiday season. I got a particular kick (not the fetal variety!) this weekend out of seeing my kids select gifts for each other. It’s not always easy to roam a toy aisle and move beyond “I want that” to “I bet my brother would like that.” But they picked out fairly thoughtful things for each other. Apparently that empathy muscle is developing somewhere!

*I presume. With my advanced maternal age, there is pretty strong pressure not to go past the due date.

Photo: Last gasp of fall color. I snapped this photo, then we had wind and freezing temperatures and that was the end of that. 

It went well. I don’t run fast, but I ran the whole thing, and had enough energy at the end to spend the day walking around with my family, picking up little kids and running around the Please Touch Museum, and so forth. Despite the summer slump, it’s been a good year for running, with the Big Sur Marathon in April and the race this past weekend. I had worried that running would fall off my list of priorities as life got busier, so I am grateful that it hasn’t. I’m grateful for the ability to run 13.1 (or 26.2) miles and still be able to function afterwards.

I’m also grateful for the perspective that running gives me. I’ve been feeling a bit overwhelmed these past few weeks with starting to write my new book while still doing publicity for the last one. I’m also writing a lot of columns and will be officially announcing a new career blog gig with BNET soon. But as I was running my 13.1 miles, I realized that just as you run one mile at a time, you write a book one chunk at a time. One interview here, one interesting factoid there, one new revelation somewhere else. This is the sixth time I’ve written a book, and I know how it goes, and how it will go, and it is really just a matter of stringing sentences together, and then making them sound better. One step, one sentence, until you are done.

I’m also grateful, though, to be taking a few days off. I’m traveling to visit family over Thanksgiving, and won’t be posting until next week. So I’ll see everyone then!

In the meantime, here’s a Thanksgiving blog post from last year, Thanksgiving and the new home economics.

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With all that, though, I’m really looking forward to this December. For starters, I have two little kids, and they’re going to be fabulously excited by trees and stockings and presents. And second, as I’ve now spent two years thinking seriously about my hours, I’m starting to ask what I’d like to spend those hours doing. What do I want to remember from this holiday season? How can I get the things I don’t want to do off my plate so I can spend time reveling in the things I do?

We’ll be exploring these questions and more during a free webinar I’m hosting called “Peaceful and Productive Holidays” on December 2 at 12:30pm eastern. Click on that link to sign up – all you need is a computer with speakers or else a computer and a phone line. If you can’t stay at your computer, you could actually just dial in and listen as well. It should be a lot of fun. I’m already making my list of holiday “want to dos” which includes:

• Going to the Nutcracker, and possibly the Rockettes (debating that one)
• Visiting the Holiday Train Show at the NY Botanical Garden
• Baking cookies with my 3-year-old. Very simple cookies.
• Singing in the Young New Yorkers’ Chorus Lightbright concert (Dec 4!)
• Caroling at South Street Seaport (also with YNYC, weekend of Dec. 18-19)
• Doing an Advent calendar with my 3-year-old
• Many, many presents under the tree. I’m hosting this year, and so I don’t have to worry about hauling presents anywhere, which means I don’t have to think simple. And I don’t plan to!
• Listening to more Christmas music in the background — more classical stuff than cheesy pop though.
• A more coherent and thoughtful donation strategy.

Anyway, 720 hours is quite a bit of time, especially if you consider that a full-on baking session will only take 3 hours or so. The key is to spend them on activities that are meaningful for ourselves and our loved ones. I hope you’ll join me for the discussion on the 2nd, and ponder these questions as well.

In other news:

• An oldie but goodie: I hadn’t seen Penelope Trunk’s (actually, the farmer’s) review of 168 Hours. (I heard from a good source that despite this cheeky pronouncement, he did enjoy it).
• I’m experimenting with haiku:

November

Late afternoon light.

The old man’s hat blows away

like one more lost leaf.

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