You don’t need a bigger dining table. People who love you will pull up the squeaky chairs and sit elbows touching.

You don’t need 27 new ingredients to make five new recipes. People who love you will open up their pantries to you — see if they have the cardamom or nutmeg. And they’ll eat what you can afford to make.

The candles you already have, half burnt or not, are fine. The mis-matched cutlery and the thrifted napkins, too.

Another meal can be pulled from the cans of beans, a mountain of parmesan can be grated from the near-rinds, and leftover dried dates, apricots and figs can be dessert.

The extension cords still visible, the Christmas tree wonky, and the music too loud or too quiet — the holiday you’re celebrating or dreading will still come.

Shopping and planning and decorating and cooking and texting and wrapping and double-checking and returning and watching movies and going drinking and looking at lights and checking off lists and remembering something else to add to the list and picking fights and making up and mopping the floor and picking out an outfit and brushing your hair and painting your chipped thumbnail can only distract us, carry us, for so long.

No package with a bow will bring back the ones we grieve, the ones whose absence makes us question what there is to celebrate. No perfect holiday menu will return us to a time before we knew too much.

And that awful now is the reason to take care, to have fun, to make do, to cry and laugh and rage a bit, too.

Shake a laughing head at Consumerism, and say, “Silly you, I already have enough.”

I’m offering a 30-minute call (plus 30 minutes of editing after) to work on either big picture strategy or editing (or a combo!) and answer questions. The call is $75 – discounted to $50 for paid subscribers (special link here.)

This call is perfect for:

Email me with questions ([email protected]) and if you book a call I’ll be in touch before we talk.

I’m taking a break from my weekly chat for December, but there’s lots of fun happening in the TOMATO TOMATO Discord Alicia Kennedy started. (There’s a thread of favorite holiday cookies that Julia Tausch started!)