Photo Credit Nicholas Safran
Holiday baking has long been one of my favorite traditions, but I’ve realized that somewhere along the way, it stopped being about the joy of baking and turned into a marathon of perfecting. Hours spent scooping identically sized cookies, arranging them into Instagram-worthy boxes, and staying up late to ensure everything looked, well, perfect.
But this year, I made myself a promise: no all-nighters, no artisan boxes. Instead, the kids and I tried some new recipes alongside the family favorites. By the end, the kitchen was a mess, the cookies were more abstract art projects than Good Housekeeping recipe card illustrations, we all ate well beyond our share of raw dough, and the frosting was everywhere except the cookies. And it was perfect.
The lesson of letting go has stretched into other parts of the season, too. Instead of writing out every address and perfectly aligning stamps on Christmas cards myself, I handed the stack to my family. The cards went out with some stamps a little askew, but we laughed at the kitchen table as we worked through the pile. The joy wasn’t in getting the cards “just right”—it was in the shared effort and knowing that we’d sent our love out into the world together.