Happy Christmas Eve Eve Eve! 🙂 This will be my last post before Christmas, so I hope everyone has a lovely holiday. I’ll be celebrating with my family. Since most of us have to work the day after Christmas (wah), we’re going to keep it low-key with a small celebration at my mom’s place. I finished my Christmas shopping a while ago and even have all my presents wrapped, so I feel ahead of the game. It should be a lovely Christmassy weekend and I am very much looking forward to it.
Here’s a little TGIF post to guide everyone into the Christmas holiday:
The high of my week was the annual Christmas dinner with my best girls, where we got all fancy and exchanged our Secret Santa gifts. This is our fourth gift-giving exchange and the third time we’ve made a reservation at The Melting Pot, a fondue restaurant where we all stuffed ourselves silly with cheese and chocolate fondue (although we all agreed that all we really wanted was pot after pot of cheese fondue). It was the best night!
The low of my week was nothing in particular, really! It’s been a fairly good week, aside from some anxiety struggles and slight bouts of loneliness I’ve been experiencing. Those are common for this time of year, so I’m trying to just ride the wave and focus on the good things in my life.
I’m currently reading Hunger by Roxane Gay. I didn’t love – or even like, if I’m being brutally honest – Bad Feminist by her, but I am loving this novel. It’s a vulnerable and gut-wrenching look at what it’s like to grow up in this society as fat. Everything Gay writes is stuff I experience on a daily basis (either from other people or what I tell myself about my fatness.) It’s comforting and eye-opening and it’s making me come to terms with my own fat body.
An article I loved was 28 of the Most Powerful Pieces of Writing By Women in 2017. I am slowly making my way through this list (the article on Dylann Roof was outstanding) that a friend shared with me, and everything I’ve read makes me so grateful for these women and their writing. I encourage everyone to check it out!
A podcast episode I enjoyed was The Defeat of Wright Patman from Slow Burn. I learned about this super interesting podcast from Anna Sale of Death, Sex & Money fame (she called it out in her newsletter). It’s an eight-episode podcast series all about Watergate where the host is trying to answer the question: if we were living through Watergate right now, would we even know it? Obviously, it has links to what we’re currently experiencing with today’s political climate and as someone who knows NOTHING about Watergate (seriously, I had to read through the Wikipedia page on it to learn about it, eeks), I’m finding the podcast series fascinating. Give it a listen!
The best money I spent this week was $25 for my work Secret Santa! Usually, my work throws a White Elephant gift exchange at our annual Christmas party, but our company is getting way too large for us to do it anymore. It would take two or three hours probably! So, instead, there was no gift exchange at the Christmas party and instead, we did a Secret Santa gift exchange at work this week. It was so much fun. The coworker I received is a fellow dachshund mom who loves coffee, so her gift was easy: a cute dachshund mug and a gift card to Starbucks. Boom, done. 🙂
My plans this weekend include all of the Christmassy things! Tonight, I am helping my mom with grocery shopping for Christmas Day (we’re not doing anything extravagant, but it’ll be good to have this done tonight). Tomorrow, I am having breakfast with a friend and then lunch with my grandpa (and that evening, I think it’s time for my annual watching of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation!) On Sunday, the whole family is coming together to make Christmas cookies and watch football – yay! I’ll also probably go out to dinner with my mom and stepdad. Christmas morning will be spent at home, although I’ll probably head to my mom’s mid-morning to open presents before my brother and his family comes over in the afternoon. It’s going to be a crazy, but incredibly fun, weekend! Woo!
What was the high and the low of your week?
Christmas cookies + football! Sounds like a win to me.
High of my week: Clear PET SCAN! YAY!
Low of my week: all the anxiety over said scan – it was for nothing but that’s such a hard lesson to learn sometimes.
I hope you have a very, Merry Christmas, my friend.
YESSS, CLEAR PET SCAN! BEST CHRISTMAS GIFT. <3
Hooray, hooray, hooray for a clear PET scan. There’s no better Christmas gift than that! <3
It’s super quiet at work this week and will be next week so I will have to work my way through that collection of writing! Thanks for the suggestion. That podcast suggestion sounds really interesting, too. I know a bit about Watergate, but not a ton so it would be good to learn more about that – especially given the interesting times we currently live in with our cheetoh president.
The high of my week was having good sugars yesterday/so far today. The low was having terrible sugars on Tuesday/Wednesday. I cried A LOT. Like multiple times a day and probably for an hour on Wednesday night. It was rough. But now that I’m figuring out what I can eat to keep my blood sugars in check, I am feeling much better!
Have a wonderful Christmas! Your weekend sounds like so much fun – especially the cookie baking with family! I’m pretty sad that Phil and I won’t be baking a treat tonight when we celebrate Christmas but I couldn’t eat what we bake as sweets are off limits to me so it’s not worth the effort. 🙁 Womp womp. But we’ll still have a fun night together even though it looks different than what I had planned (I had to adjust our meal as well).
Let me know if you give Slow Burn a listen – I’m finding it so interesting, but I want to dig deeper into some of the stuff that I’m learning from it.
I’m so bummed about your GD diagnosis and the damper it put on your Christmas festivities, but I hope you managed to have a good Christmas in spite of it all!
I just put Hunger on hold, as we both share a lot of the same insights on our bodies and self-esteem, I feel like!
MERRY CHRISTMAS! <3
Oh good, I think you’ll get a lot out of Hunger. What I appreciated most from her book was how it wasn’t a book about body positivity, but just about what it means to be a fat person in a fat-phobic society. So well-written and raw and just what I needed. I hope you love it as much as I did!
The low of my week was not sleeping well; my sleep schedule has been ALL messed up, & it’s affecting everything. But the high was that OUR WEDDING PHOTOS JUST CAME INNN.
Oh, god, I can relate to not sleeping well. Life with a dog with dementia means I haven’t had a normal night of sleep in… a very long time. It’s not fun at all! It really fucks with your brain when you’re not getting good, quality sleep every night.
BUT YAY FOR WEDDING PHOTOS.
I just downloaded the podcast. Will keep you posted on thumbs up or down!
I’m looking forward to hearing your thoughts! It is just so damn interesting, even more so based on what we’re dealing with in politics today.
I’m hooked! I just finished the last published one and am anxiously awaiting 1/30 when the final episode is available. I was a wee lass when Watergate was happening. Everything I know about it is from quick articles with a definite ‘Tricky Dicky’ framing bias. My plan is to find a well rated book about the incident, read it, then re-listen. Two thumbs up on this podcast!.
I’m late to this, but right now I’m very much enjoying the quiet end of 2017. I don’t have too much to do at work and I’m all socialed out, so it’s nice to take a break and just sort of hide out for a few days.
I had a quiet end to 2017 as well, and it was much needed and appreciated. There’s something so lovely about quietly closing out the year and not feeling the panic of running around trying to get a bunch of things done.
Your Christmas plans sound amazing!! I hope you had a great time celebrating with your family.
Thanks, Amber! It was a very lovely and quiet Christmas – exactly what I needed.
Oh, how fun that you’re doing a girls’ night out on Christmas Eve with a Secret Santa gift exchange. I love that.
Christmas Eve is when family gets together (in Germany), so I never did anything with friends on Christmas Eve/Christmas Day, but I love that you have this little tradition!
Our Secret Santa gift exchange was the Sunday before Christmas Eve – not on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is all about family for me! We made cookies and watched football, and later on, I went out to dinner with my mom and stepdad. Perfect!
Oops, I must have read that wrong 😉 but still awesome!