I started my Christmas shopping the weekend before Thanksgiving when the Christmas Village and Dilworth Park Holiday Market in Philly opened. Admittedly, I ended up buying more things for myself than for other people that first weekend. But no worries, I still had plenty of time left in the holidays to do my shopping. The Friday after Thanksgiving, I checked out the Bryant Park Holiday Market in NYC, and when I got back to Philly the next day, I kept the momentum going in Old City for Small Business Saturday. Pretty much all my holiday shopping was done over those two weekends, and I’ve been dying to share what I bought ever since, but I held off until now because I didn’t want to spoil the surprise for my friends receiving the gifts. Although the timing of this post is too late to inspire your own holiday shopping, you can keep these businesses in mind for birthdays or other special occasions!
Monkeying around the house
There’s a gorgeous festive centerpiece on the kitchen island at home. I’ve been taking all my amateur lifestyle photos in front of it lately (always at the darkest hour of the day of course, rendering the photos almost unusable, because that’s how I roll). Non-festive box of chocolates placed by the festive centerpiece? Festive! Non-festive morning cappuccino placed by the festive centerpiece? Festive! Festive nails modeled over the festive centerpiece? Irresistibly festive!
A no-nonsense guide to finally doing the thing
You’d think that as you got older, you’d know more, but I don’t think I’m alone in saying that I feel like I actually know less. If you think about it again, it’s not that crazy a notion; the more you learn, the more you realise there is to learn. Your simplistic preconceptions become tangled in complicated nuance. It would be naive to think you could possibly know everything about anything. But rather than let this be a disheartening challenge to overcome, let this gift be an opportunity to embrace.
Another way to build a habit
I missed a day of Blogmas for the first time. I even prepped one post before flying off for the holidays to give myself a little leeway, but when I arrived home, I was simply too tired, and then I spent the whole next day at a hair salon, away from my laptop. Besides that, the internet situation in China is proving to be more difficult than I anticipated. I always seem to underestimate how slow the internet can truly be. It’s mostly that my house has especially bad connection, but the internet in China overall is still pretty slow. So even though I said that being in China wouldn’t affect the content I produce, it might and it has.
One Day in December by Josie Silver
Published by Broadway Books on 16 Oct 2018
Goodreads | Amazon
Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…and then her bus drives away.
Certain they’re fated to find each other again, Laurie spends a year scanning every bus stop and cafe in London for him. But she doesn’t find him, not when it matters anyway. Instead they “reunite” at a Christmas party, when her best friend Sarah giddily introduces her new boyfriend to Laurie. It’s Jack, the man from the bus. It would be.
What follows for Laurie, Sarah, and Jack is ten years of friendship, heartbreak, missed opportunities, roads not taken, and destinies reconsidered. One Day in December is a joyous, heartwarming, and immensely moving love story to escape into and a reminder that fate takes inexplicable turns along the route to happiness.
Holiday check in
I’ve been naughty this year and already opened some Christmas presents… To be fair, my roomie Georgina and I wanted to give each other our gifts before I left for the holidays (tomorrow!), but let’s be real, that was only an excuse. The two of us have been using all the stealth we could muster to hide our presents from each other since Thanksgiving, but we’ve been dying to give them, especially the gag gifts!