Tis the Season

It's November, which for me means it's officially the start of the countdown to my favoritest time of the year - the holidays!! The intense period filled with family, friends, catching up, home-cooked meals, Christmas, snow, skiing, Tahoe, New Year's, shopping, laughing, talking...just about everything good in life, all packed into two weeks - truly the best, most beloved time of the year for me.

This year is my third holiday visit home while living abroad and while I savor every single moment of every trip home, I'm especially looking forward to meeting J and R's baby girl, who is due to be born just a couple weeks before we arrive. They are the first of my very close friends to have a baby and I am truly over the moon about becoming an auntie. In some ways I feel ashi-wuh (sad/regretful) that I am missing out on so many big and small moments of the lives of my friends back in the US - living abroad means that I will only get to meet baby Ella briefly, then see her after many-month-intervals, during which she will likely have grown leaps and bounds. That's the thing about babies - you wink and they're walking, you wink again and they're toddlers, you wink again and they're all grown up. But that's really how fleeting life is, we just seem to forget because we get caught up in the stuff that doesn't really matter - the minutiae of everyday. But the holidays are when we get to stop and really appreciate all that matters - friends, family, shared moments, laughter, good food. It's the stuff that makes life grand.