Redefining the Holidays
Yeah, I’m looking at you New Years
This particular newsletter is arriving simultaneously a little early and a little late because we need to talk about the new year, but I also want to talk about this general time of holiday merriment and stress. The two seem to go hand-in-hand and for some (myself included) there is a layer of grief wedged in between it all, too.
If you’ve been following me for a while, you’ll likely have picked up on the fact that I love redefining sh*t. It should have been my 2024 word of the year.
Redefining family.
Redefining success.
Redefining expectations, both internal and external.
If it’s not something that is written in stone as an absolute, I am ready to rewrite the script. So, it will likely come as no surprise that I’m sat over here attempting to redefine this entire segment of the year, beginning around Halloween through to the New Year. An ambitious, slow moving feat.
As a child, I used to absolutely ADORE Halloween. From what I can recall, many a Halloween night was spent roaming my paternal grandmother’s neighborhood, decked to the nines in a homemade costume. The two I costumes I remember best (but sadly have no photographic evidence of) were myself as a bumblebee and as a mermaid. I remember the bumblebee costume the most clearly because there IS a photo of me out there, somewhere holding on to my little plastic jack-o-lantern bucket with a shy smile on my face. The mermaid costume I don’t recall well, I only remember the drama of NOT wanting to wear a long sleeve shirt under the costume because I felt it took away from the magic, but then feeling oh-so-grateful to whoever forced me into one because it was unusually cold in Louisiana that particular year.
Things took a turn with Halloween the year I asked my mom to sew a princess costume for me. I was getting really into dreaming up clothing ideas and still recall how my rudimentary dress sketch looked. It was a medieval style dress in a deep purple color (my favorite color at the time) with this triangle bit in the front. I can’t remember how the sleeves looked, but something tells me they were the kind that tapered and then flared out near the wrist.
I believe I was in 6th or 7th grade at the time, and I distinctly remember my mom having an absolute melt down during the sewing process. She was obviously really stressed sewing not only my own costume, but my brother’s as well. She was also a single mom at the time and I had not only requested she sew a dress of my own design, but I believe I kept changing little things about it as well.
As I recounted this story to Arlen the other day, I realized that in my little, subconscious, childhood brain, I saw my mom in distress and immediately jumped to the conclusion that what I was asking for was too much. That I was too much. That I was a burden for having desires and I shouldn’t ask for similar things in the future. I also discovered that the following year, I taught myself how to sew.
Excuse me while I take a moment to contemplate if my entire sewing career was built on the internalized idea that sewing my own clothes = me no longer being a burden of a human.
Cut to this year where I am slowly rediscovering the childhood joy I once found in Halloween as a holiday. I sewed myself a Halloween dress, one I plan to wear every year until it falls apart. We put up a few modest decorations. We handed out candy to trick-or-treaters and were saddened when we ran out before the last of the kids had filtered through the neighborhood. I learned a bit more about the traditions of Samhain and its Celtic roots.
Now, I’m not a fan of Thanksgiving. Even as a kid, I don’t remember it being a holiday I particularly enjoyed. As an adult, learning more about the complex and devastating history of the day, I’ve further fallen away from wanting to celebrate it as a holiday. In the past, I’d continue to show up for it only because it brought me closer to my family. I’d lean in to celebrating our being together and all that I felt thankful for.
But, since cutting the majority of my family out of my life, it’s become a holiday I’m not particularly keen to highlight, but I also find it to be the toughest one to work around. How do I inform those wishing me a happy thanksgiving that I don’t celebrate it? What do I do with this now random day in which everyone else is off work, but are also doing things with their own families? What does it mean if we make special food because it’s what we both grew up with but we no longer connect with the narrative behind it all?
Now we get to Christmas and the Western New Year. The two seemingly largest holidays that happen exactly one week apart and bring up so many emotions for so many people. Stress, joy, grief, comfort, loneliness, love.
In the past few years, I’ve been really vibing with the pagan roots of many Christmas traditions, but I’ve been unsure how to incorporate them into the holiday. Like Thanksgiving, I’ve not really known how to transition myself away from the expectation of celebrating on the 25th. What do you now do with this extra day? Do you tell people that you no longer celebrate? Do you continue to wish others a Merry Christmas? What are the rules??
There truly are none, and there is no guidebook either, so this year we decided to throw a bunch of spaghetti at the wall and see what stuck. To start, we decided to celebrate the winter solstice (Yule) on the 21st rather than celebrate Christmas day on the 25th.
And it was brilliant.
We didn’t really do anything fancy. We just woke up and had a bit of coffee while reading in bed. We exchanged the few gifts we had gotten for one another and gave our cats special holiday treats in the shape of hearts. We got outside and went for a mini hike where I collected some bits and bobs that delighted me. I crafted a hearty soup for dinner and we watched our final advent calendar dvd.
It all felt intimate and simple and perfect.
With Western New Year’s Day a few days away, I’m redefining how I wish to show up for this particular holiday. A holiday marked by new beginnings and change and goal setting and the idea that “there is a better version of yourself on the other side of January 1st.”
That’s . . . a lot of pressure. And this is coming from someone who absolutely loves setting goals!
Instead of nixing goals entirely, I think I want to tweak the definition of what a goal even is. I don’t want to look at something I label “GOAL” as a task that needs to be completed and crossed off a list. I want to view whatever I label GOAL as a gentle reminder of where my true passions lie. A direction that I can follow, not a destination I absolutely MUST arrive at.
For example, one of my “goals” this year was to read 60 books. I only read 55.
To anyone on the outside looking in, they might say, “Well, technically, you didn’t accomplish your goal. You were five books short.” And they’d be correct. I didn’t achieve my goal of reading 60 books in one year.
But they’d also be wrong because the outward goal of 60 books that I wrote down was never about reading 60 books. I only wrote that number down because I felt it was a little bit of a challenge. A way to stretch the number of books I typically read in a year (I only read 39 books in 2023) as well as remind me how much I enjoy reading in my downtime. Because without the outward goal of reading 60 books in one year, I might have chosen to scroll on my phone more or take on projects that I wasn’t excited about to fill in the downtime.
So for 2025, you might see me write down a list of goals such as:
Run at least three times a week
Build the remainder of the backyard garden beds
Write 15k words a month
Learn Spanish
But know that these are simply guideposts for the deeper things I am searching for. Things like: prioritizing our health with home cooked meals and plenty of time spent outdoors; building up the garden and finding a natural rhythm with the seasons; bringing in different stories via books while also expressing my own creativity through writing; finding a gentle dance with my business as it ebbs and flows.
Learning to redefine all of these things has been a challenge. But it has also been enlightening and invigorating and fun. It’s so cool going in to things you may have once felt were rigid and could only be done one specific way and whispering, what if we tried something different? What new magic could we create?
Monthly Donation Pledge
Because it is the end of the year, I am knee-deep in accounting hell. Everyday, I am gathering up all the documents and receipts and excel files I have in order to comb through them to make sure my business accounting has been correct for the year of 2024. It’s a task I both love and loathe.
I love the satisfaction of things being organized and numbers adding up. I loathe what it takes to get there.
I’ll admit, one of my favorite tasks is seeing just how much we (you + me!) have been able to donate and to how many different organizations. Last year, I struggled to keep up with my accounting which led to less donations than usual. But I was able to catch up with all that back accounting, so this year, the list of organizations donated to is quite long!
In 2025, we donated to the following organizations:
As soon as I have everything all tallied up and double checked, I promise update the Transparency Report on the website so you can see exactly where your purchases made an impact.
Introducing: Monthly Book Subscriptions!
I’ve always wanted to offer a monthly book box, but for some reason, I never got around to doing it. Until one day I decided to jump and see what happened. And you know what? I am SO glad that I did! I’ve already got five subscription boxes happening for 2025, and picking out books for each new month has been an absolute thrill!
Shipping on these monthly boxes is totally free, but I can currently only offer this product to US customers because of the incurred shipping costs on my end. Hopefully one day I will be able to slowly extend the offer to other countries, but for now, this is the right size fit for me and my business.
However, I do have a Monthly Reading Challenge box that is available for both US & International and shipping is totally free if you choose the 12 month option. Plus the price of everything is slightly less because I’m sending all your books in a single box one time as opposed to many boxes many times.
End of the Year Reading Stats
Just a little reminder: This is just for fun. Please don’t feel the need to compare my reading journey to your own. As I mentioned above, I only make goals not so that I can reach them but so that I am motivated to get started (which is always the hardest part for me). And even though I didn’t realize my own reading goals this year, that is ok, because the goals were never the point. Finding stories that I enjoyed reading was always the main objective. And wow-oh-wow did I find a lot of truly amazing stories.
The books that impacted me on a personal level and changed my entire outlook on life:
The Overstory by Richard Powers
Four Thousand Weeks by Oliver Burkeman
The Gift of Anxiety by Diante fuchs
Untamed by Glennon Doyle
This One Wild and Precious Life by Sarah Wilson
Books that devastated me through their writing style:
The Starless Sea by Erin Morgenstern
Don’t Let the Forest In by C.G. Drews
Other Words for Home by Jasmine Warga
And books that simply delighted me:
Princesses Behaving Badly by Linda Rodriguez McRobbie
Little Weirds by Jenny Slate
You’d Look Better as a Ghost by Joanna Wallace
Planned January Reads
To round off this newsletter, I wanted to share my very rough reading plans for January, which may or may not be realized.
Currently, I am in the middle of reading two books, Finding the Mother Tree by Suzanne Simard and The Lost Bookshop by Evie Woods. I hope to wrap both of those up soon, although I will admit I have been steadily working on Suzanne’s novel for a few months now.
I also have A Sorceress Comes to Call by T.J. Kingfisher checked out from the library and will need to finish before it is due on January 7th.
Other than those three books, I also have the ambition to dive in to The Forest of Vanishing Stars by Kristin Harmel. This is a book my neighbor lent to me. I have a very full stack of things she loaned me and it is my hope that I can read at least one book from this stack once per month. Fingers crossed!
And finally, I will be diving in to The Goldfinch by Donna Tart. This is actually
’s and my pick for the No Pressure Crew bookclub, and we have two full months to make it through the 900 pages or so. I’m equal parts excited to dive into my first Donna Tart read and intimidated by the sheer volume of words that will need to be read to complete this particular story.I hope you have an amazing start to 2025,
💛 B.A. Franc