It’s Christmas week! And since we know many of you will be busy baking, wrapping, traveling, eating, and enjoying time with your families over the next few days, we’ve decided to change things up a bit by offering five short episodes featuring us reading some of our favorite holiday themed essays and blog posts out loud!
To kick it off, Sarah shares a piece she wrote for the Huffington Post. Enjoy, and check back tomorrow when Meagan will read another essay in a new episode!

Creating Holiday Traditions Isn’t Mom’s Responsibility
I can hear it. Can you? That little voice that begins with a whisper just after Thanksgiving dinner every year.
This is the year, it says. This year, you’re going to get it together for the holidays. This year the decorations will be up by December 1st, and all the gifts bought and wrapped — from locally owned Etsy shops, of course — by the 15th. This is the year you’ll nail it — creating a season filled with the perfect balance of anticipation, wonder, spirituality and altruism. But also simple and frugal and scaled-back! Don’t forget those. You can do it. Probably. Maybe.
There’s a part of the voice that means well, I think. When several weeks remain before the end of the year, the season does feel full of promise. I do, in fact, wish to be a little more intentional each year, find my groove as a mom-in-charge-of-the-holidays, and deliver to my family an experience that is both fun and also consistent with our values. So that part of the voice that challenges me, that acts as a motivator and cheerleader, is OK.
But in that whisper that only I can hear is something less uplifting, and more poisonous: pressure.
Pressure to create a holiday season worthy of these kids of mine who morph into new people as fast as they outgrow their Christmas pajamas. Pressure to make it meaningful to them, something they’ll remember, a foundational image with soft edges and bokeh lights that they draw upon years from now when they look back on their childhood. Pressure to do things that make their eyes sparkle with the wonder of a thousand Santas (and then capture those starry eyes and share on Instagram, naturally).
Pressure to orchestrate experience, to manufacture memories, to create tradition.
Tradition. (Tradition! do you not hear Fiddler on the Roof? Just me?) Traditions are a holiday staple, we’re told. Kids need them. And as all-powerful moms it’s our job to curate them, passing on those from generations past and developing new ones that will be passed along to future grandchildren. In the lead-up to the holiday season, “be intentional about family traditions” somehow gets added to the same checklist as “buy teacher gifts” and “find replacement bulbs for tree lights.”
But here’s the thing about traditions. By their very definition they evolve over time, softened and well-worn by repetition and adaptation. They aren’t launched with fanfare, shiny-new and thoroughly tested, like an ad campaign or a themed cruise ship voyage. Traditions don’t begin by looking forward into the future; they become, and only after looking back and realizing that the way we do things has become The Way We Do Things.
I have a hard time picturing our foremothers in a time before Pinterest and parenting experts sitting down with their sewing circle and remarking, “You know what we should do? We should start Christmas traditions for our families.”
I’d like to imagine that they just did what they knew: Made the same dishes every year because the ingredients were available and the recipes memorized; followed the same rituals their grandmothers had because the Internet didn’t exist to tell them anyone did it any differently anywhere else; let the calendar and the season and the weather and the rhythm of ...