December 27, 2025

I’ve been off since Wednesday, and while it isn’t possible to completely take a break in the days leading up to Christmas as an adult, the holiday has been restful so far.

We did a version of the “Icelandic book flood” on Christmas Eve, which was as lovely as I’d hoped. We lit a fire in the living room and took turns opening our books. We managed to get some pretty perfect matches for everyone, and we hung out and read for a while and afterwards spontaneously decided to watch Home Alone with the kid for the first time. I don’t think I’d seen the movie since it came out — when I was around my kid’s age — and I’d completely forgotten the grocery shopping scene and the church scene — only the various traps had stuck with me, along with the mother’s attempts to get back home (although I’d also forgotten the polka band!). The quiet family time was nice.

Christmas Day was similarly low key. My in-laws, who live about an hour away, came over in the afternoon and stayed for dinner, and we all played Grab the Mic and Hitster, which we received for Christmas from family. This was super fun — both games work well for intergenerational groups because anyone can participate, but we all have such different points of reference. We also played some games on Jackbox.tv.

Boxing Day, as the kid describes it, is a day for enjoying Christmas presents alone. For me, this meant mostly reading and trying to figure out how to rearrange the art in my office (A surprised me with prints by an artist whose work I love, and he framed them). Of course then I decided I should rearrange my office again, which is something I enjoy doing. It’s like that nesting/cozying instinct. Sometimes I’m a stereotypical Cancer the Crab. I've also been watching Premier League games and embroidering and writing.

I’m in the middle of three books right now, which is unusual. I started E.B. White’s collection of short essays, One Man’s Meat, earlier this week. On Christmas Eve, I received Jenny Bornholdt’s Selected Poems (and The Paris Review’s Poets at Work), and started reading the poems, which are quite different from anything I’ve encountered, and I realized that I haven’t read much poetry from New Zealand, only fiction. Then I had two library holds come in at the same time: The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny and North Woods. Given that library books have deadlines, and these books are quite intense (and the former is nearly 700 pages long), I started to read Sonia and Sunny, as well! I’m enjoying all three books, but I think I'm only managing to bounce between them because they're drastically different from each other.