Come Sit By Me: Volume 60

Inside: Welcome to the weekend and our weekly catch-up, Come Sit By Me. I’m spilling the sweet tea on what’s happened this week, what’s inspiring me, and a few things that have caught my eye that I think you’ll love too!

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Welcome to “Come Sit By Me”! It’s our chance to catch up on the little things I’d share with you this week if we could chat on the porch over coffee (or wine depending on the time of day).

Life Lately in a Nutshell.

After a full week in California followed by a quick Waco trip, I had exactly one day at home to regroup, unpack, and wrap all the gifts before hitting the road again to have Christmas with family. It has been wonderful—I’ve gotten to spend the holidays with people I love dearly but don’t get to see nearly often enough.

The week has also been a bit unhinged. We’ve always joked that our family should write a screenplay based on all the ridiculous things that happen whenever we’re together, and this Christmas definitely brought some new material. My sister-in-law, who had spent weeks planning every detail of our Christmas food and activities, managed to wreck a golf cart the day before Christmas Eve. She ended up with six stitches in her forehead and the brightest, most colorful black eyes I’ve ever seen, which immediately slowed her down and left my niece and me scrambling to put all the food together. At the same time, my other niece’s husband had his major neck surgery unexpectedly rescheduled for that very same day, putting him completely out of commission. My brother-in-law broke a crown on his tooth. And just to keep the family fun going, we melted a plastic tray in the oven right before gift opening on Christmas morning. Which meant two hours of scraping molten plastic and getting very creative with how to cook food with no oven.

Add in two kids hyped up on Christmas and four dogs all in a three-bedroom golf course condo, and there were moments of utter chaos. But we laughed our way through it as always. Somehow we made it to church, enjoyed our traditional homemade turkey dinner on Christmas Eve, and still pulled off our annual dress-up theme night on Christmas Day.

This year it was a 1960s Mad Men cocktail party, complete with a themed murder mystery game and 60s throwback hors d’oeuvres including fondue, finger sandwiches, and a cute retro shrimp cocktail Christmas tree. I even pulled out some of my mother’s jewelry from the 60s to go with my character’s dress (and btw, I was the murderer, that’s an AI background in the picture above for fun, and those are candy cigarettes.)

I’ll be home again on Saturday as you read this and ready to slow down for a day or two with no mishaps. But the things that go wrong always make the best stories!