A reconciliation of December

A month of contrasts, the ghosts of small business past, consumerism, and making space for future Decembers.

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December and I have a complicated relationship. When I was a kid growing up in Queens, every commercial on TV sold me the fantasy of December: the month of cozy winter evenings and the glow of Christmas cheer. My head was filled with dreams of steaming hot chocolate, dancing gingerbread men, glittery tinsel, and listening to carols on scratchy old vinyl. But I didn’t grow up with this fairytale because my immigrant parents were figuring out as they went along, what Christmas in America was all about. We adapted to American customs fairly quickly though, and decorated a fake tree and hosted parties for our extended family. Those raucous gatherings are the memories I treasure most, but I never believed in the folklore of Santa Claus or the magic of Christmas morning.

I’ve written before about the melancholy of the season. It’s usually this time of year when it hits, but every year it’s a surprise when it comes. It’s not just the grief that shows up like an unwanted chain letter in the mail, but growing up, December was often a month of dysfunction and compromise.

December has always been a month of contrasts. Joy and melancholy. Togetherness and loneliness. Overconsumerism and the spirit of the holidays.

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Mark and I took a leisurely stroll through an adjacent Brooklyn neighborhood over the weekend. It sounds painfully unremarkable, but for years in pre-pandemic times, a long walk in mid-December would have been an improbable outing. Even though we’ve been out of the holiday frenzy for four years, we still feel the ghostly traces of our bakery business this time of year when we would typically be at the point of tearing our hair out from the rush of gift orders and succumbing to tears from sleep deprivation.

Those memories come flooding back at the drop of a pin from any number of sightings: when we see a box of cookies or a holiday gift sitting on an office desk, when we walk into a crowded holiday market and chat with a vendor. We were at one such market on Sunday and walked away whispering to each other, that could still be us. In an alternate timeline if the universe hadn’t shifted, it could’ve still been us.

For twelve years, December was the month of shipping boxes, labels, ribbons, packing tape, and coming home covered in flour, streaks of baking chocolate, and a row of burns from scorching metal baking pans. December was twelve hour shifts in the kitchen for him and packaging cookies after a day at the office for me. Old blog readers may remember that I used to chronicle each holiday season in what I coined, Holiday!Cookie!Madness!

Red current and peppercorn sandwich cookies. Just one of the thousands of cookies that we would send out every holiday season.

I feel for every small business owner trying to make a living. The artisans, the entrepreneurs—anyone having to compete with the relentless deluge of sale emails, free shipping, cheap labor, fast production, and even faster turnover of products. It used to be that you could promote your goods on social media and it would rain down sales, but now it’s a fight to be seen in a noisy sea of algorithms and AI generated search results. The competition for the attention of customers who are overwhelmed by too many choices is fierce. It tugs at my heart when I hear small business owners express their frustration about marketing on platforms that no longer work.

It’s also hard to compete with capitalism when so many consumers are focused on convenience and speed, often choosing costs over the ethics of fair labor and quality. Here’s the thing. Now that I’m out of the business of selling handmade goods, I sympathize with the struggle of wanting to shop small but not always having the means to support that desire with my wallet. It’s hard resisting the lure of big box savings and I’m comfortable admitting that, even if it makes me sound like a hypocrite because I’ve been advocating to buy small for years. We have to support selectively now because like many folks, we are feeling the strain. The sad irony all along was that we wouldn’t have been able to comfortably afford our own cookies.

Small business artisan goods was very much a trendy wave born out of the 2008 recession that we rode from the very beginning until it got increasingly difficult year after year to answer the question, is this still worth it?

But I wonder—and I do not know the answer to this—do younger consumers, the target demographic that brands chase after with their social media marketing and influencer campaigns, still value small businesses and handmade goods the way we did even a decade ago? Or do they have the loyalty of established brands with big marketing budgets who can whisper in their ears like a trusted best friend?

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These days, December is really quiet, especially now that both my kids are gone. I’m reminded of past Holiday!Cookie!Madness! years when our children were left to to entertain themselves for weeks at a time while we worked. The guilt from neglect that I would feel in December used to hit me hard. Just like all the childhood magic promised to me in TV commercials except this time, I was the one with promises that I couldn’t always fulfill.

The quiet now is what’s making space to reconcile all my conflicted feelings about December. Away from childhood disappointments, away from the grief that rolls in for half my family who are now gone, away from the emotional and physical toll of small business life.

And it starts with this uneventful walk in a Brooklyn neighborhood. A walk that wasn’t planned, just one of those things you do when you’re actually a little bored and want to take advantage of a nice sunny day in a long season ahead of cold and gray. The sidewalks, shops, and cafes were all crowded. There’s comfort in watching life bustle around you.

After exiting the holiday market, we sat ourselves down on a bench outside and enjoyed the sunshine and people watching. It was blissful. My god, this is why we take walks and pry our eyes away from our screens. The news and social feeds are flooded with reminders of chaos out in the world. It’s been an extraordinary week of global news: Georgia, South Korea, Syria, an assassination of a CEO. Just crazy extraordinary news. It was the first time I didn’t think about any of it.

And that was a reminder that I am in control. I can control the intake of it all and I can control how I feel about Decembers. Because I now want it to feel like slow leisurely walks, a warm homecoming for my kids, the scent of spices and cookies, and no more guilt. Just take a deep breath. Don’t hold it in like I often did as a teenager, exhaling only when the new year arrived with the promise of fresh beginnings.

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Related reading

The melancholy of Christmas

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Things I enjoyed this week

An exhibition worth seeing if you’re in NYC:

• Ai Weiwei: What you see is what you see (at Faurschou Gallery in Greenpoint, Brooklyn. Runs through February 23, 2025).

  Mindblowing, really. These reinterpretations of iconic masterpiece paintings are all in….Lego! The sheer scale and colors really can’t be appreciated in photos. WOMA bricks (the Chinese equivalent of Lego) provide the additional color pieces that make each of these reinterpretations a different experience when seen up close and from afar.

  

  

  

  

  600,000 pieces make up this reinterpretation of Monet

To make and eat:

• We Took a Reddit-Famous Tortellini Soup and Made It Even Better (Serious Eats) We made this soup this week and it was delicious. I know it’s another sausage and kale recipe, but I can’t get enough of it when it’s cold out.

To buy and give:

• Brooklyn Candle Studio – I’ve become an avid candle person and these are some of my favorites. Candles can be so prohibitively expensive, but Brooklyn Candle is relatively more affordable compared to other brands (and I sometimes find them on sale at our local Whole Foods). I’ve given them as gifts and so far have loved Fern + Moss and Santal, but there are many more scents I want to try.

• W&P Peak Confetti Ice Tray – We bought this compact ice tray for the college kid to make ice cubes in her dorm mini-fridge. It’s so cheery and fun, plus it has a lid which is super practical.

To read:

• Monopoly was invented to demonstrate the evils of capitalism (BBC)
  I saw this older article posted on Bluesky and in light of the monopoly money that was found in the UHC CEO shooter’s backpack in Central Park, found the origins of the game very interesting. And it goes without saying that I do not condone murder and feel conflicted about the celebratory nature of this crime, but the entire story and public reaction around this killing has been fascinating.

• Find out why your health insurer denied your claim (ProPublica)
  ProPublica’s Claim File Helper lets you customize a letter requesting the notes and documents your insurer used when deciding to deny you coverage.
  They also have a whole series on how the health insurance industry claims denials.

• Totally Cooked (Slate) We picked the 25 most important recipes of the past century. Then I spent one month cooking every single one. I was not prepared.
  I don’t know exactly how it’s possible to determine what the 25 most important recipes are, but here’s a related article on how they were selected.

• My Year of Magical Realism (Evergreen review) “In Lebanon, we’ve banned the word “resilience” from our social dictionaries. It is a parasitic word. It feeds off historical pain and misery. It makes politicians feel good about our ability to do something instinctual: build after destruction.”
  A beautiful essay about the importance of language from Beirut-based writer and researcher, Nur Turkmani, with an important updated preface that expresses her detachment from the words she wrote a year ago in context of current events.