Soma Pajamas | Pineapple Lamp | Mirror Trio

At 5:45AM on Wednesday, Kendrick and the kids left for a week in Ohio. I helped pour them into warm jackets and pack up the new toys that absolutely had to come with them on the flight. I waved good-bye from the front porch, got a little teary watching the car lights disappear down the block, and went back in to drink a glass of grapefruit juice.

And then? I went back to bed and slept until ten o'clock in the morning. I had an appointment at 9AM, actually - a fact that I remembered only around noon - so guess who's getting a missed-appointment penalty fee? And guess who cares exactly zero about that fact?

Epic shot by Kim Butan for Freezy Freakies

For the entirety of my adult life, the holiday season has more or less been spent in a weird dance of trying to recapture some tiny fragment of the magic I felt as a child, and mostly failing. I've come up with various traditions that I always think will help me get back some of that loopy joy - watching Elf with a Chinese food picnic on the living room floor; going full Christmas Explosion on our house; drinking hot chocolate whenever possible, et cetera - but...it's different. Of course it is.

When I was a kid, my parents always unplugged the tree at night to keep the place from burning down, but were apparently willing to risk an apartment fire on Christmas Eve, because every year I woke up before sunrise and ran out to the living room to find the tree aglow. Even when I was tiny, I always resisted the (overwhelming) desire to sprint into my parents' room and get them with the program for a few minutes, just so I could stand there in that perfect, sparkling quiet and feel...