Happy holidays and a wonderful New Year!

I waited a bit longer to post my Christmas holiday post for this year and now it’s already 2024, so let me first wish you all a very merry Christmas, happy holidays and a wonderful New Year. While there’s no need to reinvent yourself with every new year, I hope that you will manage to let go of what no longer serves you in 2024 and bring in as much of what makes you happy as possible.

Although we already celebrated the New Year in our new home last year, we didn’t have a functional kitchen or many places to decorate yet, so it didn’t really feel as properly festive as this year. Well, this year we went into full decorating craze already on the 1st of December, because it was snowing, but then that turned out to be the only day of snow so far and the stores somehow run out of Christmas trees, so we had to settle for a pseudo-tree by decorating one of our big plants and now I don’t know if this counts as a proper Christmas either. However, we had very nice December, which is all that matters.

Our Christmas cacti went mad with flowering and my partner finally taught me how to play Magic the Gathering cards with my own fancy dragon deck – the main dragon card basically eats everything and I actually enjoy it even though I tried to avoid learning how to play for the past 8 years. For our shared Christmas gift we bought ourselves a gorgeous edition of the Lord of the Rings books to put under the pseudo-tree and my mother bought me a lot of crosswords magazines for Christmas and there was one entirely about cheese. I am also continuing with my planner/diary habit from 2022 and I’ve started putting stickers on them, so I’ve moved from the year of the sarmasaur parody Pokemon to the year of the sassy peach cat.

decorations and holiday impressions of 2023

We also have a functional and very beautiful kitchen now, so I could bake cookies for the whole family again. I was so productive that not all of them fit into the reusable tin boxes I always gift them in. This year’s gifts were therefore back to the traditional cookie box + rum pot and I am sticking to it, because home-made gifts are awesome and running around in a consumerism shopping frenzy doesn’t really appeal to me. Despite that I did some gifts shopping, because I participated in the Slovenian charity initiative Uresniči željo for the third year in a row, where you fulfil a Christmas gift wish for someone less fortunate, all anonymously and sustainably gift-wrapped of course.

the 2023 Christmas baking Fever

Another thing I’d wanted to try for a while was to make a fancy holiday charcuterie board for New Year’s eve, so this year I decided to get creative. We were celebrating at our home with some friends and I found several rather low effort ideas on Pinterest with a high wow factor + we had a giant panettone fruit cake. Everyone loved the resulting Christmas meat tree, so I am thinking of doing something similar again for next year.

New year’s eve food

Also, we finally fully finished the bathroom right during the holidays by installing the final set of shelves, so I’ll show you the bathroom home renovation post soon. All in all it was a very relaxing holiday time with lots of family and friends. It’s been a while since I’d felt so rested and at peace, so I hope that you experienced some of that too.