December

A late Thanksgiving always makes the lead-up to Christmas feel more frantic somehow– like, we must get all the decorations up NOW! Why haven't we wrapped all the presents yet? Etc., etc., etc. That this particular late Thanksgiving was followed by the first snow days of the year just compounded that feeling. Luckily, Oscar has a new neighborhood friend to hang out with on snow days. They split their time between building snow men, sledding down the backyard hill, and convincing someone to make them hot chocolate and paninis.

For his eleventh birthday, Oscar decided he wanted an escape room party, so we rounded up some of his friends and tried the Wizard's Academy room at Codebusters 2. It was a great choice– challenging without being too tough for a gaggle of eleven year olds. They worked together pretty well the whole time, but those of you who have a tween or teen will not be surprised that they were most in sync when the countdown hit six minutes and seven seconds. (Why? Why is six seeeeven a thing? When will it stop?) After we escaped– with a minute and forty-one seconds to go!– we went next door to a local brewery that very patiently allowed us to be noisy and order a bunch of appetizers and exactly one beer. (For me.)

We also hosted our second annual drop-in cookie decorating. This is our take on a tradition that Jeremy grew up with, and now we can't really imagine not having dozens of sugar cookies covered in too much icing and too many sprinkles in the house for the holidays. Now that we have gotten to know many of our neighbors, the crowd has grown, which means lots and lots of cookies. (Somehow we brought even more cookies into the house after a quick trip to a local Christkindl market. The month also involved two cookie cakes, one ice cream cake, and one cake cake.)

The boys finally got to ski for the first time this season during their shared birthday weekend. The warm winter has meant that most ski resorts haven't had a ton of open runs, but we decided to hit Copper Mountain anyway, just to get a feel for the place as it becomes our go-to (last year, we stuck to Monarch, which is a lot smaller– a great place for Oscar to learn and gain confidence, but not super exciting now that he feels like he can tackle trickier terrain).

In addition to skiing, we also celebrated with a fancy dinner for Jeremy. He picked Carlos' Bistro for his dinner because we have been eyeballing this place for three years, and he decided it was finally time to take the leap. From the road, this does not appear to be a super fancy restaurant. It's next to a gas station and across the street from our favorite drive-thru Mexican place, and its decor is . . . unique. Imagine neon green streetlamps and an enormous fire pit. Inside it is a lot more traditional, and the food was good, though not necessarily memorable. We also felt conspicuously young, which is a surprising experience when you are there to celebrate a forty-sixth birthday.

And on Oscar's actual birthday, we ate popcorn for dinner at SpongeBob SquarePants: The Search for SquarePants, which is extremely silly and fun. Then we grabbed an unexpectedly adorable ice cream cake for dessert. Of course, we also still had a huge amount of Jeremy's birthday cookie cake to work our way through– and by "we" I mean "he," because the rest of us really can't handle the amount of sugar in that thing.

Christmas week itself was a typical mix of extremely busy and having too much time on our hands. Oscar had taekwondo leadership camp (it was on his birthday, so we sent him with a ton of donut holes to share); we went to the Electric Safari at the Cheyenne Mountain Zoo (my parents got us a membership for the 2026 centennial year); we had doctors appointments and dentist appointments and oil changes to deal with. But we managed to make Christmas Eve and Christmas Day very chill, to the point that Oscar stayed in pajamas the whole time. (Not the same pajamas, but pajamas just the same.) Most of our energy was spent on cooking what have become our traditional meals: lasagna on Christmas Eve, and turkey with our favorite sides for Christmas Day, plus brunch and an unnecessary but yummy Christmas-tree-shaped snack. On Christmas Eve, we opened our traditional gift (matching jamas) and had our annual viewing of The Muppet Christmas Carol.

Presents this year trended toward Lego, and Oscar couldn't wait to start building. (So far, he has made a giant truck and the two cars that go in it, a typewriter, a Game Boy, and a Porsche.) I got some great botanical sets myself. Oscar also got tons of books; I wrapped a bunch of them in this hamburger wrapping paper, which I personally find hilarious (and I only used a quarter of it, so he can expect more hamburger stacks on future Christmases).

We don't really do huge New Year's Eve stuff, but we did get to wrap up 2025 with a couple of our traditions. First, on New Year's Adam we went to the symphony for "Rhapsody in Blue." Aside from that piece, the program varies every year, though the thing Oscar looks forward to the most is the balloon drop at the end. And on NYE, we had our fondue and apps lunch, followed by chocolate fondue for dessert. Oscar negotiated for a later bedtime so he could watch the ball drop in New York City, which he promptly declared "boring and disappointing."

In other news, I decided to try out for a play for the first time since we lived in Arkansas. We've seen a couple of shows put on by this local community theater group– including The Play That Goes Wrong, which I think is still Oscar's favorite show that he's seen– and I have been really impressed by them, so when I saw a call for auditions that needed multiple forty-something women, I decided to give it a try, and I ended up getting a part! The show is I Remember Mama, and I will be playing Mrs. Moorhead, a famous cookbook author. Rehearsals start right after the new year, and I'm looking forward to getting to revisit my theater kid self.

Doggo news: Nutmeg and Turtle handled all of the holiday craziness pretty well– especially when their dog cousins came to have a play date while my human cousins decorated cookies with us. Nutmeg is fully a teenager now, and after growing at breakneck speed for the past seven months, she seems to have slowed down a bit. And Turtle has definitely started maturing a bit, although he still has his moments when he gets too bored or excited.

Books:

• Heartwood by Amity Gage: A book club read that I went into knowing almost nothing and thoroughly enjoyed. The central plot is about a forty-something woman who gets lost on the Appalachian Trail, and the narratives involve a variety of people who are trying to find her, but the book is also about human connection on a much more basic level.
• Slow Dance by Rainbow Rowell: Like all of Rowell's novels, this one plays with ideas about first love and growing up– this time by moving back and forth in time to document the relationship between Shiloh and Cary, who were high school best friends in mutually unrequited love before sharing one romantic weekend and then losing touch for more than a decade. Their reunion as adults is realistically fraught, but I do wish someone in Rowell's orbit would encourage her to stop having her characters say each others' names all the damn time.
• Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano: I guess this was a big book club pick a few years ago, because it feels like everyone I know has read it by now, but I just got around to it– and was completely caught off guard. Somehow I never got an inkling of the plot and was expecting something totally different than this pensive, sometimes sad, always moving family saga.

TV Shows:

• Stranger Things, season 5: Jeremy found this last season less involving than I did, and I would definitely not say it is perfect– for one thing, the first episode is basically straight info-dumping, and the Wrinkle in Time stuff feels awkwardly shoehorned in. But there is also a lot to like here in terms of how the characters' relationships are developing, especially the friendship between Robin and Will. (I'm posting this before we watch the finale, so I reserve the right to change my take if it sucks.) (Update: It sucked.)
• Emily in Paris, season 5: This show has never been anything more than extremely pretty fluff with a French accent. Emily herself is basically insufferable, so I watch it for her best friend Mindy and the other background characters. The first half of this season is set in Rome, which is a welcome change of scenery, and the clothes continue to be bonkers.
• Suits: I know this show has been off the air for years, but I have always heard such good things about it, and I am trying to challenge myself not to just keep rewatching the same three shows over and over again. So I started this one, and I like it! Not so involved that I have to hang on every word, but energetic and funny.

Movies:

• Wake Up Dead Man: The third and, in my opinion, the best (so far) of the Knives Out series. I will admit up front that am an unapologetic Rian Johnson fangirl. I love his genre bending and wordplay and how well he can orchestrate an ensemble. Those skills are for sure on display here, but he grounds this film in something that feels weightier than the previous installments. And that works because everyone, but especially Josh Charles– who completely walks away with the whole movie, no matter how appealing Daniel Craig continues to be as Benoit Blanc– really invests in this investigation of religion, faith, and guilt.
• Wicked: For Good: Last year, I was really pleasantly surprised by Wicked. A lot of what I liked about that one is still on display in For Good, but the story is . . . iffier. I'm glad I sought out Act II spoilers because I'm not completely convinced that the film sets up the final scenes clearly enough for viewers who don't know what's going on. Cynthia Erivo continues to be the best thing about this project, but Ariana Grande is also fantastic– better than in the first half, I think, because she seems to be relying less on Chenowith impersonations. Jonathan Bailey, on the other hand, is just too intense in every single moment, and Michelle Yeoh (while otherwise fabulous) cannot sing.
• Eternity: This is a fairly standard "it'll make you laugh, it'll make you cry" kind of movie, with Joan having to decide whether to spend eternity with her first husband, who died in the war (Korea, which the movie turns into a admittedly pretty funny running gag) and her second husband, to whom she was married for sixty-five years. The cast is all very good– this may be the least annoying I have ever found Miles Teller!– but the main problem here is that Da'Vine Joy Randolph has more chemistry with everyone on screen than any of the points on the love triangle have with each other. Randolph needs to be the star of her own romcom immediately.
• The Housemaid: I wasn't going to bother with this one, but I was extremely close to hitting the platinum level on my movie club membership and decided I might as well. I wasn't sure what to expect, but once I saw that it was directed by Paul Feig, things started falling into place– it's more dramatic, especially in the first half, but it shares a lot of its DNA with his earlier and very funny A Simple Favor. Unfortunately, Sydney Sweeney has only one facial expression for the entire movie, which I used to think was an acting choice she was making and now realize is . . . just her face.
• Anaconda: This is exactly as dumb and as fun as you'd expect and hope it would be.

Stitching updates are sparse this month. I worked on this stamped cross stitch, part of a set of four that my aunt picked up somewhere, and I finished two more Christmas trees, one of which was part of the ornament exchange at our last EGA meeting of the year.

In the new year, I'm going to be splitting my time between finishing my 2025 temp stitch and a fun Colorado flag stitch one of my EGA chapter members designed.