My Dear Friend,
Merry Christmas and Happy New Year, my love!
How are you this holiday season? So jolly, I hope.
As you read this, I hope that you’re roasting next to a roaring fire and bundled up in wool, classic carols quietly crackling though your speakers, a boozy eggnog nearby. There might be gingerbread in your oven. Cinnamon sticks and a clove bundle floating in cider on your stove.
Maybe you’ve strung a garland this year?
Hung some mistletoe? Really decked our your halls?
We did.
This year, we dressed up the big front window of our new home with some multicolored lights and some glittery bows. I’ve been perpetually burning “winter spruce” scented candles and I bought some mistletoe and a poinsettia, too. There are stockings hanging for Tim and Lars and I, waiting to be stuffed with trinkets and chocolates, and a garland of holographic paper candy canes is taped up in the arched entryway to the dining room.
We also got a tree this year, Tim and I.
Did you know that this is our third Christmas together, but only our first tree?
We bought a Noble Fir (at my insistence that we buy a tree with a strong holiday fragrance).
When we got home Tim hauled the four-and-a-half footer upstairs and screwed the base of it into the tree stand. I wove a few strands of white lights into the branches and crowned the top with a winged angel—a relic from my childhood recently rediscovered in some forgotten box that was hidden away in my mother’s garage. We decorated the tree with a mismatch of ornaments; bulbs collected from both of our childhoods and also some newer ones like an Eiffel tower from my mother and a fluffy, fat cat that looks looks like Lars from my dad and Shelley.
It sure is cozy in here. I’m glad we opted for the Noble. It smells so richly piney.
I’ve really liked cozying up next to Tim on the couch and basking in the warm glow of our first tree. I put out slices of Harry and David pears and English butter toffee on the coffee table for us to nibble on while we lounge. He watches football games and I read Wally Lamb.
I keep bugging Tim about my Christmas list.
Hey, baaabe, I reaaally want this green velvet reading chair for that corner by the bookshelf.
Tiiim, will you remember that I looove that cactus bralette from Urban Outfitters?
Baaabe, can you get me these Ugg boots for Christmas? Pleaaasee???
Truth be told, I don’t actually expect to receive any gifts for Christmas because, fuck, I wasn’t event that nice this year.
And also because there’s nothing like the holidays to remind you that you don’t even really need anything at all because you already have a man who loves you with a great job and the cute cat and a beautiful home in Santa Barbara and what else could you ever need?
(Well, I do really want that green velvet reading chair.)
I truly have a lot to be be grateful for. It was a good year.
This year, I got to see my whole family.
In March, my brother Sam and his girlfriend, Rebekah, came to visit Tim and I in Seattle and in July, my mother came up to celebrate the 4th. For Thanksgiving, my brother Nathan and his wife, Mercedez, flew to Santa Barbara from Austin and we celebrated with a big dinner in my my mom’s backyard. When we moved to Santa Barbara in late August, we moved in just two blocks away from from my brother David.
In October, I saw two jackrabbits at Joshua Tree and last month I found some kind of animal bone in Santa Ynez.
As per usual, I did a lot of reading this year. I read Oliver Twist and A Passage to India. I read Madame Bovary, Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery, Wuthering Heights, Les Miserables, The Kite Runner, Things Fall Apart. And I read Truman Capote and Hunter S. Thompson, Bill Bryson and Rabih Alameddine. Essays by Erica Jong and Dorothy Parker.
In the spring I bought myself a vintage apron and a fur coat and in the fall I mastered the art of cooking six minute eggs.
Last week, I inherited a car from Sam when he and Rebekah left for a year-long trip that’s going to take them throughout Europe and Asia.
So, if I may be totally cliche for just one minute, all the presents that I’m most thankful for this year couldn’t even be wrapped up with tinsel or tied up with ribbon nor could they fit under our twinkly tree.
This neat little home that we’re making. My new job at the art museum. All the great things I did and saw this year. Santa Barbara. Lars. Us here. Tim with me. Me with Tim.
Those are the real presents.
And what’s at the top of my real Christmas list is for Tim to be so happy. I know it was a hard thing for him to leave Seattle, his hometown, his family and friends, his job, all so that I could be happier than I was there.
I’m always so thankful and grateful for all of it.
I hope he knows it.
I think he does.
I tell him every single day that I love him so much. I hug him to death and wake him up early every morning when I leave for work to kiss him on the lips. I cook dinner every night. Stock the fridge and pantry with his favorites: hummus, goldfish crackers, prosciutto.
Since he’s moved to Santa Barbara, I’ve done my damnedest to show him all the great things about living here and I try really hard every day to make him excited about being young and new and in love in the sun near the sea.
In September and October, when heatwaves hit, we spent full days at the beach, laying on our towels, getting crispy hot from the glaring sun, and then refreshing ourselves with somersaults in the blue, clear shallows of the Pacific. I pointed out to Tim a few seals and pods of dolphins and little red-orange crabs in the sand. All the time we watch the sunset from the shore.
At Halloween time, I took Tim to the Lane Farms pumpkin patch in Goleta where there’s a corn maze. We got really lost in it and after about 35 minutes of making wrong turns, we resigned in frustration and asked a staff member for directions to the
exit.
Sometimes, on warm evenings midweek, I suggest that we picnic at the Mission Rose Garden. We bring pizzas from Sal’s or salads from Whole Foods.
We naked hot tub at my mother’s house all the time. Tim loves a good soak. He turns off the bubbles and marinates in the still, steamy water. He stares out at the silhouette of the mountains that rise up above the city, notices the outline of big dipper, studies the full moon.
We’ve gone on some great hikes here, too. At Rattlesnake Canyon we splashed our faces with cold, fresh water that was miraculously pooling in the usually parched river bed. We hiked at Red Rock and White Rock and Los Osos and Lizard’s Mouth. More recently, I took Tim to the Carrizo Plain National Park where we climbed through the San Andres Fault Line.
At Thanksgiving, I suggested that we go camping so Tim could break in the tent that he bought at REI. We spent the night at Los Prietos Campground in the Los Padres National Forest and feasted on a dinner of salad, mashed potatoes, cornbread mushroom stuffing and filet steaks that tasted like lighter fluid.
I do know Tim appreciates my efforts to make him happy.
Because he tries really hard for me all the time, too.
I live for the adventures we go on together.
In April, he took me to Chicago. We went to Cloud Gate at Millennium Park and spent a whole day at The Art Institute. We had beers at the top of the John Hancock Tower and we admired Lake Michigan.
My favorite trip of this year was in February when we went to Tucson where we hiked for two whole days at the Saguaro National Park.
I truly love the desert—its stillness, its infinity, its mystery.
Tucson was wide skies and clean air. It was dusty trails and snake bites and horse hooves like the real wild west. It was also plates of carne seca with rice and little pueblo homes and roadside Elote like how it is just south of the border. There, at night, the stars shone bold, constellations crisp in the giant sky.
In Tucson, I got to meet my grandmother’s headstone. I never had the pleasure of meeting her when she was alive. Rosemarie Kaiser, my father’s mother, was a Mexican buried in a Mormon cemetery with a Star of David sewn on to her dress when she was laid to rest in 2006 (and you all wonder why I’m such a fucking nut). May she rest in peace in her desert grave.
On our last night in Tucson, I got a tattoo. A simple silhouette of a saguaro cactus and the outline of a crescent moon. I still like it a lot.
In June, Tim took me to New Orleans for fried food and live music.
For Valentine’s Day, he surprised me with an overnight stay at a secret, snowy mountain lodge in Leavenworth. He treated us to a couples massage and buttoned up into a nice shirt for dinner in the lodge’s dining room.
Tim always surprises me.
Sometimes he’ll bring home some really beautiful filet mignon steaks for us to grill up for dinner.
A few weeks ago, he downloaded a documentary for me to watch on his computer all about the cats in Istanbul because he knows how much I love, love, love little cats, especially my own.
For our two year anniversary in November, Tim gifted me a cast iron skillet and the most gorgeous Christian LaCroix journal that’s patterned with palm fronds.
He’s so sweet.
Sometimes, though, if we’re being totally honest, it seems like all Tim and I do is fight.
Fight about how I’m too dramatic at the gas station when everyone is taking forever to fill up. About how I always stain the white kitchen sink with resin from the bong when I’m cleaning it. Fight about how Tim eats all the groceries without saving a single bite for me or how he drinks too much beer.
But, after all of it, none of it matters as much as how much I love him.
I love him so much.
For all the big things, of course, like the plane tickets and the hotel rooms.
But even more because of all the little things.
Like when he brings me tweezers from the bathroom to help me pick at unsightly ingrown hairs along my bikini line or when buys me Arizona peach iced teas from the gas station late at night.
He lets me decorate the house however I want, burn all the fruity candles, and is always polite to my friends when they come over at midnight to smoke joints.
I hope that we can spend all the rest of our Christmases together forever.
And I hope that this new year is as great as the last.
It’s a tall order.
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