My Favorite Things of 2024

A Pocketful of Prose Holiday Bash

“Raindrops on roses and whiskers on kittens, bright copper kettles and warm woolen mittens, brown paper packages tied up with strings, these are a few of my favorite things…”

I promise this entire post will not be me reciting the lyrics to My Favorite Things, but…

“When the dog bites, when the bee stings,” when the storm rages outside the Von Trapp family’s lovely, elegant, palatial front door, and the kids come to Maria for comfort, she tells them to think of their favorite things. Each cherished thing they sing about becomes a candle in the dark scary night.

In scary times, we feel vulnerable, but Maria reminds us we can choose where we place our attention, and in doing so, we can choose who and what we give our power over to. During the darkest days of the year, I also like to name my favorite things. I feel braver when I turn toward the light.

I will be taking a pause from publishing over the next few weeks, so that I can let my writing simmer as I spend time with family. I have tried to make this last pocket of the year extra special for you. Imagine this is the Pocketful of Prose holiday bash, one you actually want to attend, and this pocket is coming to you in brown paper packaging tied up in strings, really tasteful strings. I hope it brings you a little cheer. If it does, please shout it to the hilltops, or share with a friend or maybe even consider becoming a paid subscriber.

Photo by Nathan Lemon on Unsplash

Without further ado, today’s pocket.

“Let’s start from the very beginning, a very good place to start,” and go back to the Von Trapp’s for a minute. Did you know they were actually a family singing group? Yup, that’s right. Maria and Georg had seven real children. Maria was twenty-five years younger than Georg, and the family left Austria when it was annexed by Hitler. Eventually, they applied for immigration status in the United States, and Maria wrote a memoir about her family’s story, and that story eventually became The Sound of Music, the Rogers and Hammerstein version many of us grew up watching in our living rooms. I love knowing these facts. Don’t you?

I like learning new things. Last Saturday night, Dan and I grabbed some pizza after watching the theater production my high school was putting on. It was not The Sound of Music, but it was magical. While we waited for our pizza, we played a round of Trivia Pursuit. The dark blue Trivia Pursuit box was a little rough around the edges. It may have been the same version I played with my family as a kid because Yugoslavia was still a country. I can’t remember the specific question, but I got it wrong. It wasn’t the former Yugoslavia’s fault. I’m terrible at trivia. For a long time, I said I didn’t like trivia because I wasn’t good at it, but these days I’m kind of digging the things I’m not that good at, things that are silly and fun and make me laugh, sometimes precisely because I’m not good at them.

It's fun to play games with people. Every Christmas, I give my family a game. Last year, it was Listography, a game that also involves a fair amount of trivia and the making of lists, a real Georg and Maria match, I’m referring to the Hollywood couple here, not the actual Georg and Maria, who I learned married more out of convenience than love. Some things are not quite as magical as we think.

Another game my family plays at Christmas involves a wrapped gift. Each year, I tuck a trinket gift, maybe some tootsie roll pops or the like, inside a box, which I tuck inside another box, it’s turtles all the way down, and then I wrap it all up with masking tape and willpower like a fortress no sane person can penetrate. The object of the game is to get to the gift. The rules of the game require one player to wear oven mitts and a Santa hat while trying to unwrap said gift. The catch is that the person to the left of oven-mitted Santa, rolls two dice continually until they get doubles, at which point the person opening the gift must stop opening the gift and pass it to the person on their right along with the oven mitts and the Santa hat. They then try to open the gift while the person on their left rolls for doubles. It is absolute mayhem, but so much fun, a great game that people of all ages and opinions can play that requires zero skill.

Unfortunately, I don’t have oven mitts and Santa hats to pass around, but I am excited to share my favorite things with you today and play a little trivia.

I’ve organized my favorite things into Trivia Pursuit categories, and for each category, I will share a random trivia question. I would love it if you played. Winners will receive a prize, maybe some tootsie roll pops, or maybe my lifelong affection, so get ready.

The six classic categories in Trivial Pursuit are:

• People & Places

• Entertainment

• History

• Arts & Literature

• Science & Nature

• Sports & Leisure

People and Places

My slice of the pie for People and Places goes to traveling itself, with and to the people I love. This year was a year of trips for me, trips I took by myself to see people I loved, trips which afforded me the opportunity to spend one on one time with my nieces and nephews which I really LOVED, and trips I took with someone I loved. I really like these one-on-one trips that allow me to zoom in on my loved ones. Going abroad with my daughter, seeing a bit more of the world, and seeing it again through her eyes was spectacular. Dan and I also kept up our tradition of taking a just the two of us trip, something I believe feeds and sustains our partnership and is just a lot of fun. We left our teenagers home to care for Cato and each other, and we spent a few days in Santa Barbara, California. Thinking of the Santa Barbra sunrise and the tiny buttery crisp blueberry muffins Dan and I shared overlooking the ocean, brings much-needed light to dreary and dark November days.

Entertainment

“He takes off her dress now… it's killing me…” I got to go to a few amazing concerts this year. Dan surprised me with tickets to see The Indigo Girls, women who I have been rocking out to since I was 15. Seeing them perform against a backdrop of banned books was incredible. Over the summer, Dan, Anna, and Seabass and I also saw The Decemberists play at our outdoor Pavillion. As we waited for the band to come on, we played a game of Heads Up. The sun was setting as John Darnielle took the stage, and the river was awash in pink and orange light. We danced into the dark, and I remembered what it was like to be part of something bigger than myself, to be drawn close by art and beauty.

History

This category felt tricky. How can something that happened this year be history, and yet it is precisely that. I am grateful for my history. The four of us always decorate our tree together. As we pull the ornaments out of the box, I can see a map of our life forming, the ornaments made from scraps of tissue, playdough, and cardboard are time travelers. We joke about the ornaments that are no longer around because Cato ate them, a yearly joke, except it’s more tender now because Cato probably won’t eat any ornaments this year. She’s not eating as much as she used to.

It feels like we’re close to the end of something.

I remember getting so upset about the ornaments Cato ate. To be fair, some of them were cherished memories I could never return to, Seabass’ handprint we made together in his cooperative nursery school, chewed up all over the carpet with barely a ribbon remaining. I remember wondering at the time if I was mad at what she had destroyed or mad about the things we can never go back to.

At the holidays, I sometimes find myself clinging to the things I can no longer go back to in the same way the ornaments cling to the evergreen branches. Still, there are some divine moments, moments when I breathe in the tree, and I’m just so grateful to be alive.

Arts and Literature

This one might come as a surprise. I could list a lot of books that brought me pleasure this year, but I have already done that in few other pockets. Here’s one if you’re looking for that sort of thing, but I’m going to go in a different direction. I want to return to what I said earlier about leaning into the things I’m not good at but that bring me joy all the same. One of my favorite things this year was taking an art class. The class was three hours long, and as the date of the class approached, I worried about what I would do for three hours, not being good at art and all. The class was a texture class, and we were encouraged to bring supplies, many of which I had never heard of before. My friend, who had taken the class once before, convinced me that we could just show up with cardboard. “Cardboard is a great canvas,” she said, “because you can make mistakes and not worry over them,” which sounded brilliant until my friend couldn’t make the class, and Anna and I were lugging her cardboard into a room full of strangers, who all seemed to have some kind of canvas in front of them. My friend was right, though. The cardboard was perfect for our purposes, and the class was great. “Pay attention to what speaks to you,” the teacher told us at the start of class. Like Maria, she encouraged us to say what we liked, to discover what sparked joy. She too seemed to think this was a powerful practice.

Science and Nature

This category is totally for the birds. This year, I fell in love with birds. It all started when I got a pair of glasses and could see things for the first time. A whole new world opened up to me, a world of tiny, singing, beautiful birds. I watched the goldfinches in my garden all fall. I was surprised when they stuck around in November. They loved my sunflowers. I loved them. When Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of reciprocity in her new book The Serviceberry, I understand because I have sunflowers and goldfinches in my garden. Do I need anything else? I bought Amy Tan’s beautifully illustrated The Backyard Bird Chronicles. I’m considering taking up drawing. I also bought Birding to Change the World for my brother-in-law, who also loves birds. I got myself a library copy, and I was entranced before I finished the prologue. I bought winter bird feeders to keep out year-round, and when I make tea, I boil some water to break down the ice in the feeders, so the birds have water for the winter. When Robin Wall Kimmerer speaks of the earth’s gifts, I understand because of the birds. I also bought myself a camera, so that I could take pictures like this one.

The camera is a complete splurge, and yet I can’t really think of a better way to spend my money, than documenting the lives of these beautiful creatures. Some things are so much more magical than we think.

Sports and Leisure

This is the category my dad always dominated growing up. Unlike my dad, I know very little about sports. I know that you play them, and I kind of know how to play some of them poorly, and playing them poorly does bring me joy, but sports trivia holds little interest for me, and I rarely watch games my kids aren’t playing in. I watch the Bucks play basketball to bond with my teenage son, but I’m not going to write about basketball here or any other physical sport, instead I’m going to dive into leisure. I have spent a lot of time this year thinking about what brings me pleasure, and one of the things that continues to bring me pleasure is writing.

I have gotten good at carving out space for my writing. Last year, I started taking solo writing retreats at our lake cabin. One of my favorite things this year was inviting two of my writing friends to go on retreat with me. We ate good food, basked in the October sunlight and wrote together. It was glorious. This week, I had a lovely exchange with Alison Acheson of Unschool for Writers, who gave me a new way to consider the word retreat. “I think there’s something,” she said, “to recognizing the quality of ‘retreat’ in our choices.”

Oofff. I love that. When my kid has kendo practice, and I sneak away to a corner of a local establishment to look at the Christmas tree and write, I am retreating. When I light a candle in my living room and do morning yoga while Dan readies Cato for a walk and the kids’ alarms go off and they stay in bed, I am retreating. When I get my first rejection from an agent and I go to the coffee shop and write something that gives me peace, I am retreating.

Over the next few weeks, I will be retreating. I will still be writing, but something inside of me is telling me I need to retreat from publishing for a minute. I need to take the pressure off and play with a little cardboard.

I’ll be back on January 12^th to share my mess with you.

Till then, I wish you peace, joy and love.

Mary

If you’re looking to do some reading over the holidays, I’ve listed and linked some of my favorite Substacks from 2024 below.

I would love to continue this conversation in the comments. What are some of your favorite things from 2024? What games do you like to play? What do you love that you are leaning into? What are you terrible at but love doing anyway?

My favorite Substacks written by friends (kick-ass women I get to hang out with)

Literary Merit by Andrea Bass

Small Change by Annie Allen

Crying Out Loud by Judith Spitzer

Matriarchal Blessing by Celeste Davis

Substacks I’m Most Likely to Read (other than the ones listed above)

Sowing Words by Kristy Acevedo

Tea Notes by Erin Boyle

Things That Don’t Suck by Andrea Gibson

The Isolations Journals by Suleika Jaouad

Letters from Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Human Stuff by Lisa Olivera

My Favorite Substacks that Support Writers and Writing Practice

Spark by Elizabeth Marro

Craft Talk by Jamie Attenberg

Writing in the Dark by Jeannine Ouellette

The Rhizosphere by Janisse Ray

Writing in Company by Julie Hester

The Substack that Always Makes Me Laugh (I want more of these, please recommend)

Pretend You’re Good At It by Jen Zug

My Favorite Poetry Substacks

Poetry Unbound by Pádraig Ó Tuama

Fleeting Temples by Danusha Laméris

Poetry is Life by James Crews

My Favorite Nature Substacks

Trackless Wild by Janisse Ray

Easy by Nature by Bill Davison

Turtle Paradise by Lynn Cady

Sarah by the Season by Sara Sterley

Matters of Kinship by Katharine Beckett Winship

Nature :: Spirit — Kinship in a living world by Priscilla Stuckey

My Favorite Fun and Festive Substack

Time Travel Kitchen by Jolene Handy