Archives - Weekly Update

As promised, we're bringing you a very abbreviated newsletter this week as we all felt that three weeks between newsletters was a loooong time.

We had a lovely Christmas celebration at our house; the flowers to the right are the ones I arranged for our Christmas dinner. There were lots of books given as presents; I love being the book elf for folks. I wonder what it would be like to live in Iceland, a country where giving a book is a treasured thing each holiday season. I loved reading this piece about the annual Iceland Christmas "book flood."

I feel like the holidays snuck up on me this year. It’s been one whirlwind of a month. This is the first time in 15 years that we will not be heading to the Outer Banks for the holidays. Schedules did not jive to work for all of us to get away, so we are spending Christmas and New Year’s at home. I found myself with a dilemma about where to put the tree, as we added some furniture pieces over the past dozen plus years --- many of which have been designed and built by my husband. To fit the tree, we needed to move a terrific piece out of the front foyer (you can see a photo of the tree to the right, and above are some other holiday trims around the house and outside).

December is the month where 4.5 weeks of work get crammed into 3 or 3.5 weeks! Everyone is scurrying around managing work life with moments of holiday cheer packed in between. It’s rather hectic as we all are juggling intense deadlines with random moments of planned and often frenetic fun.

I hope you all had a nice Thanksgiving weekend. I compressed a lot into those days, including reimagining turkey in a few new ways, cleaning up the garden, planting amaryllis plants (trying to grow three in water this year), redecorating the wreath for the front porch, and kicking it back a notch.