You're doing great

This is your permission slip to knit something for yourself, take an extra nap, and recharge in the way that feels most nourishing to you

A peek at my Christmas tree and some of my oldest ornaments. These are 45+ years old, harkening back to the Christmas of 1977, when I was 10. They remind me of how hard and dark times can coexist with sparkle and beauty. Bitter and sweet. Grief and gratitude.

We’ve just passed the winter solstice here in the Northern Hemisphere. I love how so many cultures have traditions around the winter solstice, some stolen, some co-opted, some unique.

My family’s traditions are a secular mishmash of Christmas, solstice celebrations, trying-to-reduce-our-capitalist consumption, and old school German and Protestant rituals. Because I am the primary caregiver for our family, I am also the magic-maker, the one who strings twinkly lights and puts up our Christmas tree and lights scented candles and bakes cookies. I’m always looking for ways to add to our family’s ease and joy, while remembering to include myself in this equation.

I know that many of you reading my Sunday letter are also your family’s magic-makers, and I have a simple pep talk for you this Sunday:

You are doing great.

Whatever you can manage, whether that is big or small. Whether you are hating this time of year, or delightedly watching Christmas movies. Whether you feel full of the spirit of Noel, or feel grumpy and curmudgeonly …. You are doing great.

This is a complicated time. Whether you celebrate a secular Christmas like me, a religious Christmas, Kwanzaa, Hanukkah, winter solstice, nothing at all, or another variation … this is a complicated time.

Winter holidays can feel like they take up so much space.

I know very few people who are (or can be) neutral or detached about the steam train of a capitalist Christmas that bears down on all of us. Exhortations to buy, memories of having had plenty or having had not enough. Messages that family is what it’s all about, but when you may have complicated relationships with family. An air of busyness and hustle everywhere, when everything about your soft animal body is urging you to slow down and hibernate.

I am here to tell you that you’re doing great with all of it. No matter how you feel about how you’re doing (not enough, imperfectly, nailing it, holding back tears), you are doing great.

I am also here to give you a permission slip to take a moment, or a day, or a season, to remember yourself.

Knit something for you.
Take a nap.
Eat a favorite cookie. Eat all of your favorite cookies.
Snuggle an animal or a small child, if that feels comforting to you.
Rest.
Cry, if that feels comforting to you.
Remember. Or forget.

Be your unique, beautiful, there is only ever one of you, self, and know that I am rooting for you. You are doing great.

Two years ago, a reader sent me this book. It belonged to the reader’s mother, and I remain charmed to have it in my library. I hope all of you feel the blessing that came with this book and that it fills your hearts, too. People really can be the best.

I originally wrote the short essay, above, in 2022 and refreshed it for this year. In doing so, I realized something new about myself. It seems that every year at Christmas I have a burst of energy to knit small things. I hadn’t realized this, but there it is: this picture from two years ago and words written about knitting small things.

This isn’t the usual way that I knit, and I wonder what it means that, each year in the darkest time, I suspend my usual habits and structures and turn, instead, to small things. Small things, like socks, or knitted gnomes, or tiny ornaments.

Small things give me a sense of progress and momentum, which I think I need, more than usual, in the darkness of mid-winter. Holidays, and the things we do, year after year, have a way of becoming layered memories. I remember other years, and other things that happened at this time of year, and they meld together, layer upon layer, with so many feelings. And the Christmas socks are here again. I finished the pair, pictured above, earlier this month (two years after I cast them on) and have since cast on a new pair. Maybe I’ll finish the new pair this month. Maybe in a future December.

And now a wish for you: May this season of feelings, be they bitter or sweet or both, may the joy and the grief, the romance and the heartbreak, be as soothing and easy as possible.

You are doing great.

In solidarity and with love,
Anne

PS: I’ll be on break from now through January 6, so look for my next Sunday letter in about 3 weeks.

PPS: I am thinking about hosting a mini-retreat (similar to our Election Week retreat) from January 19 to 21, to wrap this community with a bit of extra connection and support as the presidential term in the U.S. shifts from Biden to the right.