My circus. My monkeys.

Dear friend,

Picture me sitting down to write you this missive. My tea is hot, the house is quiet, and handmade Christmas decorations glow and twinkle as I survey the exquisitely wrapped presents under the tree and peacefully dream what lovely thing to write you.

Hahahahah!!! Oh no. It is actually total chaos up in here!!!

It’s the mad swirl of the last few days of the school year, and the impending Christmas festivities, plus there’s two guys here working on our bathroom which means saws and drills and sawdust and weeks stretching ahead with a torn-up bathroom with nine people in our house.

We have had a sawed-in-half bathtub IN OUR FRONT YARD the last two weeks. But it’s gone now, and I feel pretty fancy about that.

Still most of the presents aren’t wrapped, and all the fun events conflict with each other, and everyone wants to go different directions, and we had to get a new car battery this week.

Is it even the holidays until someone mutters Merry fucking Christmas under their breath??? (And by someone, I mean me.)

But here is what I know.

This is my circus. These are my monkeys.

And gosh, I love the hell out of them.

Everything is a little chaotic, I’m behind everywhere, I keep getting flushed and hot (could be perimenopause but also could be cooking for the hordes in my little kitchen) and nothing is ever quite as peaceful and gracious and harmonious as I want it to be in the fantasy picture in my head of how family life should go.

But this exquisite messy chaotic overfilled life— this is the one I choose with such gladness, again and again and again.

So I’m going to try to give us the very best of myself in the coming season, while holding on to myself in the process. (Tricky! To show up wholly and fully without over-giving and ending up empty! The only trick I know is, when you notice you’re empty in spite of your best intentions, to pause and fill back up again!)

That means this missive is short, because I’ve got dinner going and my mom is finishing wrapping the last round of presents and I promised we’d hang the stockings, so here we are in the thick of it, ready or not.

I’ll take it.

I’ll take every sweet thing this season brings, and I’ll take the salt and the bitter too.

It’ll be winter solstice when you’re reading this, and I keep thinking that what I just love about humans is that on the darkest night of the year we’re like, you know what this day needs? Light. Candles. Bonfires.

Light the lights, darlings—it might all be a bit of a mess but I see this mess and I declare it GRAND.

Love you!!!

Merry everything!

love,

Katherine

P.S. I haven’t dried those oranges yet but DAMMIT I AM GOING TO.

P.P.S. Tis the season for bad news about Santa! Everyone you love whose kids believe in Santa are going to need this book at some point, and the time to buy it is long before they think they need it. The Secret Society of Saint Nicholas: all details here.