nog season
Every year I make a different holiday loaf (or, I should say, many mini loaves) to give away, rotating between things like gingerbread loaves, orange and cranberry loaves, and pumpkin spice loaves. For 2024, I went back to the egg nog loaves I discovered years ago, although rarely make. I think because they bake up a little boxy and irregularly-shaped (which I remembered as I watched them in the oven), but honestly, they are so good that the shape shouldn’t be a deterrent. So consider a nog loaf if you are looking for a similar holiday tradition.
Holiday time is so delightful, from the treats to the decorations to the extra excuses to buy things to the overall extra amount of happiness and hope that seem to be fostered without any additional effort. I must have cried about 4X more than normal so far this month, emotions just feeling closer to the surface as I do regular things like watch animal rescue videos, holiday commercials, and movies (the ending of My Old Ass…who saw that coming???).
Of course, I also feel more gullible in some ways, more likely to click on Instagram ads for a lighted device that smooths your face (arriving to my mail box in a few days), a pill that melts away fat (watched a 30-minute promo video), and an automated cat feeder that rotates at programmable times (how had I lived without one??). I’d like to think it’s just part of the more generous, more hopeful spirit of the season.
It’s also a time of reflection, not so much on the year coming to an end (except at work, where we exhaust ourselves trying to make the case that exceeding our metrics is not simply meeting expectations), but more on the year about to begin. Everything from budgets to fitness to career to hobbies and pursuits gets examined through a lens of potential accomplishment and progress. Also, change. Where would we want these areas to be in another year’s time, we ask. How can we get there by breaking them into a series of achievable, motivating goals that we’ll resolve to complete? And what can we throw onto the end of the list that is a slam dunk or perhaps already done to ensure that we achieve at least partial success?
For me personally, I love this time of year for just that reason. I set new goals for the coming year, I reset a budget with each category irresistibly fresh and unspent, I even type a letter to myself on my vintage typewriter with advice I want to keep in specific focus for the year. I hope you’ll take some time for your own version of whatever this looks like—a reset, a sharpening of focus, a dream to finally pursue, a change to shake-up your trajectory. A toast to you then, as we move together into a new year, me with my chai latte with lemon, honey, and cinnamon added in an effort to avoid buying the fat-melting pills (it does not taste good), and you hopefully with something that tastes much better.