It's Coming On Christmas...

"It’s coming on Christmas, they’re cutting down trees…”

Christmas is my favorite time of year. Of course. When your birthday is on Christmas day, you don’t really have much choice-but I’m pretty sure I would love Christmas regardless.

Christmas in my world is about a lot of movies and television specials that I share with my girls, some of my most favorite books, hot chocolate every night, twinkle lights, and a tree in every room. Fun times.

This past weekend we went to see The Best Christmas Pageant Ever at the CPAC, which is our local community theater. Every year I read this book to my girls and every year I cry at the end (they hate that I cry, but I just can’t help it). Mrs. Bennett read this book to my class in the 5th grade and I am always reminded of the way that she emphasized certain words as I am reading it aloud. Mrs. Bennett and I didn’t get on all that well-which is a bit odd, because mostly I was always a teacher’s pet-but she read books that I love still and have shared with my girls- Soup, The Secret of NIMH, and most of all, The Best Christmas Pageant Ever.

Anyway, other things I’m loving this week:

Bookselling is the Most Over- Romanticized Job in the World

Like all girls who dream of growing up to be Kathleen Kelly, I tend to imagine that nothing could possibly be more fun than to run a bookstore where all I did in a day was recommend books to people and host a super fun story hour. In reality, of course, bookselling is a somewhat tedious job full of math and algorithms and no end of things that this English major would find mind numbingly boring.

(On this note, I follow Annie B. Jones on Instagram, who is a real life Kathleen Kelly and owner of the Book Shelf in Thomasville, Georgia, and her stories are a delight, despite the obvious truth that she does spend time at work doing much more than reading.)

The Cut on Tuesdays

Okay, I listened to the episode from November 11, 2018, titled Beat Around the Bush on the recommendation of Laura Tremaine (who is another great Instagram follow). I’m not really going to say much more here because it’s way too TMI, but if you listen to this and want to have a follow up conversation about this, I’m down with that. (This makes me so desperately want to have a pod cast club in the same vein as a book club, because sometimes you just need to discuss.) And if this isn’t your speed, it’s cool and we never need to talk about it.

Paperback Crush by Gabrielle Moss

If I make a list of books that I loved this year, this one is going at the top. It's a coffee table type book all about the genre of "Young Adult" books of the 1980s and 1990s. So, right up my alley. It's an homage to all my very favorites (The Baby-sitters Club, Sweet Valley, Fear Street, Lois Duncan) and also some books that I completely forgot about (Camp Sunnyside Friends, Sleepover Friends) and some that I had never heard of but now desperately want to read.



Life just now, in my last few weeks before 40, is full of 1990s music (particularly 1997) when I'm not jamming to Christmas music (and as always, the Hamilton soundtrack). It hardly seems real to me that it's been 20 years since I was that girl who so desperately wanted to know where her life was headed-would she fall in love ever, would she have two girls, would they love The Brady Bunch and Annette Funicello and all the Disney songs?


How I wish I could tell her, calm down, you get all of that and so much more.


I'm hoping the 60 year old version of myself is thinking the same thing.