God Rest Ye

Look, I love Christmas. I'm deeply selfish about it. This is something I inherited from my family when we moved to a city in which none of our grandparents or aunts or uncles or cousins lived.

There were too many of us for seeing our extended family to be affordable, so we simply did not see them. We stayed home and had comfortable, easy, homey Christmases. I recommend it.

I do think it's nice having a period of the year during which everyone remembers that they should be trying to see their family, but I think doing it then, at that moment, is insane. It's the worst time to try and go anywhere! It's so stressful and expensive!

It ruins the other thing that's lovely about this time of year, which is that it is a time when everything slows down (except retail, thoughts and prayers for retail workers). You barely have a choice. Everyone is deferring things until the new year, there's no fighting it. It's why I approve of the secularisation of the season – whether you're celebrating the birth of Christ or not, your out of office is on and if it isn't it might as well be, because everyone else's is.

I think we have forgotten how to rest. I'm certainly extremely bad at it, which is fun because I'm also not great at being productive. But I'm trying to get better.

I want to rest more actively. Not just veg out while scrolling when I should be doing something else. I want to get better at deciding when it's time to rest and committing to it.

There will be no newsletter next week. The next one will be in 2026.

Rest up. Rest well.