And now I can breathe

The semester is FINALLY over, which means I can now go back to a somewhat normal life for the holidays. I’m still awaiting the grade for my final project for the class, but I nailed my final exam with a 98/100 score, so I’m just going to put school out of my mind for a good while and take some time to get caught up on housework, my non-education-related reading, knitting, etc.

I am… struggling with the holidays this season. I love the glitter and the lights and the cozy nights with family and friends and the food… and I have found myself outright hating the commercial aspect with gift-giving and such. Everything is so loud and overwhelming. I saw an ad while watching Hulu that implied giving a GAP-branded hooded sweatshirt every year was like a tradition and that it implied love and thought. It’s. Just. A. Sweatshirt. And one that was probably made by small children in some 3rd world country for that matter.

The thing is… no one I buy for actually needs anything. We all have houses that are full of stuff, and we’re just going to be adding more stuff to those houses. Or maybe we’ll be replacing our perfectly fine stuff with brand new stuff just because it’s new and we have to get rid of something to make room for it… which, either way, just means we’re contributing more to landfills and waste and and and… the amount of stress I feel when I think about all of this is probably ridiculous, but this is what I’m going through this year.

I am pushing through some of it this year, because it was already too late for me to really plan anything different, but I think next year we’re going to approach the holidays much differently. A far more reasonable, less commercialized holiday is what I’d love to try.

We’ll see.

Speaking of gifts… Sean has requested a knit hat for Christmas, so that has been my latest project. He rarely asks me to knit him anything, so when he asked for a hat I had to immediately get started on it. He specifically requested I use stash yarn because, in his words, “you already have plenty of yarn to choose from” so that’s what he’s getting – a hat knit out of the leftovers from a sweater I knitted a few years ago. I’m not going to lie – I’m disappointed by not being able to go yarn shopping for this gift. But I can’t fault him – I did have yarn to use for it, AND it helps me with my stash down numbers so I can end the year with less yarn than I started with. And I know he will appreciate that I didn’t spend extra money on yarn lol.

Tonight we’re baking Gingerbread houses. I ordered this cute little mold set from Pampered Chef because I’m all about shortcuts when my kid is involved in helping. So we’re going to try baking those tonight and see how it goes. We don’t normally do gingerbread houses so maybe it’ll become a nice little tradition for us.