Holiday 2016 Photo Diary

I hear these teddy bears are over 25 years old.

Tulle and craft paper gift wrap.

Christmas carol rehearsals.

Every year after college, Christmas has been a capital-p Production - thanks in large part to my boyfriend's family, who are fiercely festive beginning several weeks before Thanksgiving and stretching juuuuust past the New Year.

For starters, every year the gift wrap scheme is a little different. Oh, we plan that stuff. We browse Pinterest boards and hunt through Target shelves and come up with the perfect paper-ribbon-tag combination that is equal parts practical and ornamental.

This year we indulged an undeniable flair for the dramatic and wrapped packages in tulle, which has such visual volume & presence that I don't think we'll be going back to ribbon.

And speaking of ribbon - that's how we exploded red plaid all over the tree.

I needed the help of approximately 3 million treats to capture this picture.

The wildly pretentious but also wildly beautiful Artifact Uprising print services packaging. 

Part 2 of the Production is a party featuring endless trays of cheesy cornflake-topped potatoes and the smallest barbecue sausages known to man - family & friends literally spend the entire year waiting for both. 

Somewhere in there we fit in a Christmas train set (it's exactly what it sounds like) & presents invariably get unwrapped several days early as some people decide they can no longer wait.

Next year's challenge to self: More plaid. More tulle. More time. More denial when the season ends.

Still.

Cat bedding by Plow & Hearth, matte finish water bottle by S'Well, lights by Urban Outfitters.

Sometimes when I lie awake into the early hours of the morning, I like to think about all the rooms I have ever temporarily thought of as home.

As a young adult -  especially in college, the memory of which is still fresh in my mind - one can feel uncomfortably itinerant. The four walls of your childhood room suddenly seem too close together, and the shelves upon shelves of YA books and stuffed animals so cloyingly juvenile. You're Grown Up now, after all - and this is not home any longer.

A handful of dorm rooms serve as temporary home bases: different residential halls, each with their own pitfalls (Edwards so cramped and musty, Campbell with those charming centipedes), and having to move in and out at the end and beginning of each oppressively hot summer. Each May I tore myself away from a small single bedroom I'd only just become accustomed to, and with choked back, purposeful melancholy, packed and stored my things, hoping desperately that next year's lottery-won room would measure up. Then, in September, I painstakingly arranged all my unpacked, familiar objects (rainbow alarm clock, stand-up fan, posters and odds & ends) in exactly the same places relative to each other. When finished, nothing would seem quite right. And I would begin the school year with a sense of disjointedness and dissonance.

Traveling was the hardest and the loneliest. If I think back to New York City in 2012, the bottom of my stomach drops away and I remember dinners eaten alone and sleepless nights on a fourteenth floor watching traffic come in from the Williamsburg Bridge. I think of a bare-bones room with a microwave and linoleum floor and a loud shared bathroom, and of my rickety top bunk that stood too near the ceiling. And even lonelier was London, my narrow oblong place with a drippy sink and a drafty window facing a row of brown Edwardian apartments and their skeletal rooftop antennae. It was never warm in that room, and I spent most nights bundled in a down duvet with a mug of hot water from the hallway bathroom.

Each room I have lived in, I have grown to love, and stayed in each for too short a time. I feel as though I have left little pieces of myself here and there - in all my tiny Princeton singles overlooking green yards, in my Lower East Side building, in the heart of Bloomsbury, and up four flights of ancient stairs in Oxford. I feel stretched thin - too much of me spent loving too many lost, transient spaces.

When I moved into my current apartment I did not expect it to be for more than ten months. But it has been 23 months and counting, the longest time in recent memory that I have ever lived anywhere - that I have ever stayed still - and parts of me are creeping into the place, lending it a domestic warmth I'd been afraid to cultivate until now. A pitcher here, a placemat there, and piles of books on every horizontal surface. 

I am beginning to stay still, and for now I prefer it - a kind of peace.

Hello, Paris

On 3/18 I arrived in the City of Lights around lunchtime, ordered a prosciutto sandwich from a roadside cafe, checked into my opera neighborhood hotel, and promptly passed out until nighttime.

I say it too often, but there's something sublime about seeing a new place for the first time at night. Time feels different in the dark -- almost like it halts. And I get to wander pathways rendered otherworldly by light and shadow and step out of my own life for a while, overwhelmed only by this newness.   

First evening look at the Opera Garnier in all its wedding cake-y glory.