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Month: December 2023

Happy Tibb’s Eve

Happy Tibb’s Eve

A Newfoundland and Labrador tradition, Tibb’s Eve is really an old word that may be rooted from the word tipple. A Tibb’s Day is a day a day that doesn’t really ever come (an intercalary day, as it were). Since half of (or maybe more) of my dragon boat team is from The Rock I’ve become familiar with it as I’ve gotten older.

I really enjoyed the wikipedia history of Tibb’s Eve but I think it is interesting that it’s gained in popularity over the past 20+ years. Those years saw a dramatic outpouring of young people from NFLD & LAB to go make their fortunes in other parts of the country. It makes sense that they would have a day where everyone who was home for Christmas from other parts of the country would make space for a day of celebrating with friends.

Colin Howlett’s quote resonates, “Tibb’s Eve on December 23, when people drink and eat at kitchen parties and bars with all the people they want to celebrate with before spending time with those they have to. I have no idea how that isn’t huge everywhere else.”

Winter Solstice 2023

Winter Solstice 2023

In the mid-90s my friend D started our Solstice traditions. We would all gather at her 200 acre farm in eastern Ontario (lovingly nicknamed The Pharm) and celebrate the turning of the year from light to dark, dark to light.

The Summer Solstice began with what she had called The Freak Family picnic. She had intended to gather people she had befriended from various usenet groups to coming out and camping. The beginnings of the FFP were wildly chaotic and many people came from all over the world (and in pre-9/11, some people even flew their own planes in). It was the event of the summer for years and anyone could come and camp out for the Solstice.

Winter Solstice you could only attend if you had already come to the picnic and had become friends with D and the others. Because Canadian winters could be bitterly cold, there was limited space in the house for people to warm up so you had to get along. It was no time to make new friends. Those gatherings were more intimate and quiet, with most people spending time going back-and-forth from the giant bonfire outside to shaking off the chill inside. We stayed up all night, watched the sun come up on the ridge and it was very much like pushing the reset button on your life.

The Solstice celebrations worked because it gave us a way to celebrate but removing a lot of the religious aspects. Since our friend group is a multi-faith group, it only seemed right to create something that we could all celebrate together. We chose our own traditions and rituals around what people have celebrated since, well, since there were people: the movement of the sun and moon across the sky.

Of course, life moves on and D has moved away from The Pharm (the last celebration being summer 2009) and it has since (sadly) been sold off. D has lived in various places around Europe and North America in the past 12 years and is now settled in upstate New York. There was a lapse of in-person Winter Solstice celebrations for awhile but we still managed to do a lot of online video meetings. Then, in 2017 a rare confluence of factors found that many of us could make it to a Winter Solstice, and so we hosted one that year. 2018 and 2019 were more subdued but many Americans came and local folks joined and then, of course, 2020 happened…


The last Winter Solstice on the Pharm, 2009

This year I was determined to host one because I felt that since the Summer Solstice we had a rough go. Between a broken foot, two surgeries and the destroyed condo, I needed to welcome the light back into my life. What better way to do that than good food & drink, great friends and a roaring fire? I wasn’t sure that anyone could make it but I put it out there anyway, and figured at the very least I would celebrate.

Shockingly, people came to town from Pittsburg and Toronto and stayed the night, friends I hadn’t seen in a very long time decided to stop in and we ended up having three generations of people join us – all descended from the original crew of Freak Family Picnic people. It was the exact right amount of new and old people and while some people did crafts, many of us just talked and caught up on many years of post-pandemic information. There was food, laughter and light, just the way it is supposed to be.


My baby playing with the baby of a woman who I played with when she was a baby

I don’t know what the next six months holds for our family but it did feel good to shake off the stress of the last six months with a celebration of light. Like many people, we are heading into Christmas and all the stress it can bring but I feel more grounded and relaxed now that Winter Solstice has rejuvenated me. I wish love and light to your families no matter where they are in the world, no matter what you celebrate. I hope the final days of 2023 see you closing out the year with reflection and with calm before the world kicks back into gear in January.

For those of you interested, we did a Celtic Omen Days craft this year where we made bookmarks to represent the upcoming year. There is still time to do it as the days technically start on December 26th.

The end of #12DaysOfChristmasMovies

The end of #12DaysOfChristmasMovies

I suppose it started on Friday when The Youngest was not at all interested in going to get a family picture taken with Santa OR The Grinch. I sort of pushed back thinking it would be a fun Christmas activity & they said, “I don’t mind taking a family photo for Christmas, I am just not interested in the Santa/Grinch part.” Fair enough.

The entire scenario had a bit of “the beginning of the end” vibes.

We first started our #13DaysOfHalloweenMovies and #12DaysOfChristmas movies events in 2020 when it was the height of the pandemic. I was looking for ways we could celebrate the seasons in the face of no trick-or-treating and, big family dinners & visits to see Santa. The kids were 10 and 12 at this point & they had just had the rug pulled out from under them: no school, no friends, no family, no typical holiday celebrations.

It worked. We watched movies, shared our reviews with family and friends on social media and a new tradition was born. People told me that they looked forward to the kid’s weird reviews of things they had never noticed about movies they loved. It was fun…for awhile.

It’s 2023 now though and the kids are 13 and 15 and have mostly gone back to a normal existence. So instead of a fun activity we do as a family, it’s slowly morphed into a chore. We have slogged through a few movies in the past week and a bit and quite frankly I wasn’t enjoying it and I don’t get the impression Mr. Tucker and the kids were either. So after a busy weekend full of whirlwind activities I announced to the family that #12DaysOfChristmasMovies was coming to an end. We were all relieved.

The Eldest pointed out that we were more of a Halloween family and Mr. Tucker mentioned that there were way more movies for that time of year anyway. He said the Christmas movies seemed to have a couple of good releases a year but that the majority felt like a slog through a low-budget swamp. Fair enough. We still will watch new movies that pique our interest (and revisit some classics!) but not on such a rigid schedule.

What worked during the pandemic when we were all home with nothing to do didn’t transfer well to kids who were older and developing their own Christmas traditions with friends.

This lengthy preamble has a point and it is this: if a tradition doesn’t work for you, feel free to change it. I spent many years rolling the holiday rock uphill like some modern-day Sisyphean Santa and quite frankly, I resented it. My mother did it, my grandmother did it, my great-grandmother did it and I am stopping it. It’s too much work and the return on investment is low. If the point is to spend time with loved ones, then that is what we should focus on, not a rigid standard of how we spend time together. The pandemic gave me a perfect opportunity to switch more things up, which I happily did & continue to do. Here is a small list:

– We no longer get a fresh tree: as I became more disabled, the work fell more on Mr. Tucker’s head to drag a fresh tree home and decorate it. Last year we found a pre-lit tree on sale at Canadian Tire and we’ve never looked back. The Eldest was a bit disappointed because she loves the smell of a fresh tree, so I bought her an electric wax melt contraption and some melts that smell like evergreens. Mr. Tucker is happy, the smell of balsam fills the air and we’ve reduced our fire hazards. I do have fresh greenery in the form of a wreath that was bought from a local farm that was a fundraiser for The Youngest’s school. A little bit from column A, a little bit from column B.

– We no longer host a HUGE Christmas dinner: Mr. Tucker and I are a> the only people in the family with younger children; b> the main connection between both our families. For years we hosted 11-15 people for a large family dinner. It was exhausting, expensive and hugely unappreciated. While some people helped clean and people brought things, we were constantly inundated with the odd snarky comment and the occasional heated discussion. When the pandemic hit, we breathed a huge sigh of relief and stopped doing it. Now we order Chinese food on Christmas eve to hang out with my dad, Christmas day we eat leftover Chinese food, and Boxing day my stepson comes over and he and Mr. Tucker cook an elaborate dinner together (they both love cooking & my stepson is a sous chef). Christmas is now a relaxing, calm affair.

– We no longer do a children’s cookie decorating party: We used to do the Christmas cookie decorating party every year and other friends hosted the Easter egg decorating party, the Canada day party, and the Halloween potluck where we’d hangout and have dinner and drinks before heading out en masse to go trick-or-treating. Sadly, while these were great times, our kids got older and aged out and the parents also aged and didn’t want to do anymore hosting. I have some fantastic memories from those years though! We’ve instead replaced it with decorating cupcakes for The Mission’s Christmas dinner.

– I stopped doing Christmas cards: I really thought I would do some this year! I have had The Eldest draw our cards in recent years but you know what? She is too busy being a teenager to prioritize that anymore. Christmas cards are also super expensive to mail, averaging about $75-$100 a year to send out 50 cards (depending on if we used Santa photos we had to pay for and how many we sent out). Again, this feels like a relief now that I have made the decision.

– We focus more on Advent calendars than gifts: This is kind of a weird one because it saves us not much money or time but as a family we have decided that a small gift every day is much better than a bunch of gifts on Christmas morning. The Eldest loves a good makeup calendar, The Youngest loves a tea calendar and we all have used book calendars. I find it makes the entire month special for us.

If the holiday season is stressful and full of expectations, I heartily suggest you reject all of that (as best as possible) and concentrate on the parts of the season you enjoy and that makes you happy. I love the midwinter season: I love crafts, good food, friends & family, The Vinyl Café Christmas album and chilling out by the fire with a book and a cup of tea. So I focus on those things and spending time with my immediate family & good friends. Whether or not you do all the things or if you don’t do all of the things I guarantee someone will be disappointed, so you may as well just disappoint everyone and save yourself the work.

2023 holiday preparations and my birthday

2023 holiday preparations and my birthday

Yesterday was my birthday. So because the Wordle is my love language, I told myself that the Wordle of the day would guide my birthday:

So Mr. Tucker made me breakfast that featured bacon!

Last week was a whirlwind of activities with friends and I am constantly grateful for the amazing people I have in my life. I forgot to post tree decorating pics, which happened earlier in the month. Last year one of The Americans* put together all of the pie pieces from the various thrifted Trivial Pursuit games she has and sent all of us our colours to be used in ornaments! They remain – to this day – some of my favourite ornaments.



Also, our friends The Cohens invited us over to celebrate Hannukah with them, which meant a lot of delicious latkes and donuts that they made for the occasion. We also got to hang out with their amazing babies, which is also a pleasure. The Cohens have such a lovely, close-knit family that it is such a joy to be around them all. I am grateful for their continued friendship – especially since they also live in the neighbourhood!

It’s funny because my friend’s daughter** married into the Cohen family and we have always stayed relatively close/in touch. It’s strange and beautiful that my babies are now holding/babysitting her babies when I used to hold/babysit her when she was a baby. The circle of life, Simba.



My birthday weekend was pretty great, all told.

Mr. Tucker and I chatted on Thursday evening about how things were looking financially. That came on the heels of him trying to install the microwave above the stove in the condo with a friend of ours…and it not working out. So now we have to find someone who will install it for us. SIGH. Finding someone to do the complete condo renovation was hard enough as it was because it was such a small job, which is why Mr. Tucker just DIY’d it. So now we’ve tripped at the home stretch.

But instead of getting down about it all, we’ve just decided to roll with it, assume he will have to work longer than anticipated, and then we promptly decided to free up some money in our budget for more fun things with the kids this holiday season.

While I am not a person who enjoys receiving gifts, I do enjoy experiences a LOT. So with the stress of this season upon us we made the decision to eat out not once, but TWICE this weekend. We had already planned to go out for all-you-can-eat sushi on Sunday for my birthday but we also went out to a mid-range steakhouse for dinner on Friday before hitting the mall. The Eldest was having a Christmas gift exchange sleepover at a friend’s place the next night so she wanted to grab some gifts.

We had an amazing time Friday night just having a leisurely dinner, hanging out as a family and chatting about our respective weeks. Was it expensive? I think I physically cringed when I saw the bill (don’t tell teenagers that they can order “anything they want.” Especially if your teenagers love lobster). Do I regret it? Not at all. It was a fantastic night, The Eldest got a steal on her friend gifts, we bought the kids Christmas pajamas as well and it was an easy night all around.

Saturday found The Eldest baking cupcakes for our yearly Cupcakes 4 Christmas donation for The Mission’s Christmas dinner. The Youngest spent the evening decorating them, and Mr. Tucker dropped them off bright and early Sunday morning.



While the kitchen was turned into a cupcake factory, I snuck out for an intro pottery class! I share a birthday with one of my closest friends and so three of us decided that we would celebrate together by trying our hands at the pottery wheel. It was…an adventure! While I loved the class – and it flew by so quickly – I feel like I would like more instruction and more skillbuilding that a short one-off class can give. I may look into longer classes next fall.



Our pottery will be fired and glazed and in a few weeks we can pick them up from the store. I am looking forward to it!

Sunday – on my birthday proper – I basically spent the day playing video games, as I requested. For dinner we had AYCE sushi at a (surprisingly great) restaurant near us. The food is good and they have robot servers, which is just charming. It’s less of a relaxing hangout type of dinner and more of a HOW MUCH CAN I GET INTO MY FACEHOLE type of event. I have long learned to not overdo it but my sushi-loving children went overboard and suffered greatly for it. I am still surprised at how much the kids can shove in there, it feels almost like it defies physics.

Back at home, Mr. Tucker and I had a few celebratory birthday drinks while the kids readied themselves for the school week ahead. We haven’t had a lot of time to just sit and BE so it was a lovely way to end a whirlwind of a week and a really great birthday.

Today I am in full planning mode for our Winter Solstice party on the 21st. Since people of all ages and from various places will be joining us after a long hiatus, I want to make it the best one yet. We haven’t had one since 2019 so I am very excited to host one again.

I hope you are all well and I wish for a non-hectic week for all!


*These ones are my Americans. Get your own.
**The daughter is the child of the woman who used to live on the 200 acre farm mentioned in the Wordle link.

Have yourself a merry little update…

Have yourself a merry little update…

We are fully in our #12DaysOfChristmasMovies era. So basically our evenings are dinner and a movie every night!

Today my friend K dropped off a fruitcake for Mr. Tucker – who loves the stuff! Her fruitcakes are particularly special because she candies all of her own fruit. He is very judicious with the fruitcake and savours every bite.

Tonight we are heading over to our friends The Cohens for dinner and Latkes and we are so stoked to see them! Life has been busy with all of our kids getting the flu and colds all through the fall so it’s been pretty impossible to make time to hangout. Since I had so much medical drama we haven’t really even seen them since the summer.

I am planning to host a Winter Solstice party on the 21st but I am trying not to get my hopes up that it will happen (but I bought food for it anyway, because I am an optimist!). It’s been canceled for the past 3 years for obvious (covid) and non-obvious (also covid) reasons. My hope is to have a wee party with crafts and fireside chats. I have also convinced The Eldest and Mr. Tucker to perhaps play some music for the event. Solstice is my favourite part of the holidays and it’s sad that I haven’t been able to celebrate it. I will send the invites out today.

Other than that, I am basically just playing The Witcher, reading books, hanging out with the family, and trying to plan for the new year. I have a few things I usually do and while I am not a resolution person, I am a planner by nature and have some plans for 2024.

To round this off, two links:

I cannot disagree with this list of books to buy for the beginner. In fact, I lost my OG copy of The Wealthy Barber and just bought a used one online. I still maintain that it is one of the BEST (albeit dated) books for a young adult to read if they are just starting out.

When the foundation is broken: Both Taylor and Britney had great success early on. They broke records and appeared destined for Great Things. Two decades later, Taylor is TIME’s Person of the Year, while Britney spends most of her time isolated inside her home and putting out weird Instagram posts. She is, by her own admission, struggling to put her life back together…I know we all know this, but it bears repeating: It is really, really hard to make a success of your life if your foundation is broken. It is hard to be “a source of light” when you are constantly fighting darkness, both inside and outside of yourself.

Vibesession

Vibesession

I love Kyla Scanlon’s YouTube channel because she talks about interesting things. We know that there is a disconnect between things actually being pretty good and people thinking they aren’t good. Kyla’s videos explore a lot of that messaging.

OH, I also found out that she writes as well.

Going sideways

Going sideways

Sometimes Mr. Tucker has a frustrating work week and that always makes me run* to my spreadsheet. I like to double-check that the numbers are still on track. We are so lucky to have a permanent form of income right now that could carry the house should he lose his job. It’s better he doesn’t lose it – and it’s not in danger of being lost – but we could manage.

The one thing it can’t do though is cover the condo expenses (at least not without significantly reducing our lifestyle). We have been ->this close<- to getting everything done in there for weeks now but every time Mr. Tucker makes a plan to go and finish off some of the details, he gets derailed. Sure, it’s been a never-ending deluge of work incidents but it’s also been random, uncontrollable stuff, which makes it worse! For example, he got caught up in a protest downtown for so long that he ran out of time and then had to double back to pick up a kid in time. It feels sometimes like all forces are against us.

But the good news is that the Bank of Canada hasn’t raised the rate and people smarter than me suspect they will start lowering in a cycle or two. That may help the housing market a bit.

The worst part is that our chequing account is lower than it’s ever been. I can’t believe that at one point in my life it was normal to have under $5 in a chequing account because today if it dips under $1500 I panic. In all fairness, everything will get paid, and things are fine but it’s amazing what you get used to.

It’s been such a heck of a time for bleeding money – and right before the holiday season**, too! Part of the reason why it has dipped so low is that we had to buy all new appliances for the condo and since we abhor carrying debt, it got paid as soon as the credit card balance was due. We anticipated that expense but then came a series of unexpected expenses:

    • Mr. Tucker’s glasses broke, so that was an eye exam and some new glasses (thank you benefits for paying a lot of that!).
    • Our car randomly died downtown so Mr. Tucker had to have it towed to the dealership. They couldn’t figure out why it wouldn’t start but still charged us a couple of hundred to look at it (but hey, free car wash***?)! There were three Lyfts on top of that to get back and forth. We got a battery jumper kit for the car in case it happened again because even with the free tow, we still need the car to go vroom.
    • We went to the dentist this week and learned that Mr. Tucker’s benefits have run out, so that is more out-of-pocket money we hadn’t anticipated (and I can only snail mail his portion to my benefit company like it is the freaking 90s).
    • Then, the piece de resistance: yesterday we had our first major snowfall…and the snowblower stopped working. We have given in for this year and just paid for a snow removal service. In all honesty, the snowblower came with the house and was probably old when we moved in. We’ve lived here for 6 years now so it was probably time. We will look into fixing it when we have less on our plates****.

Everything is just so incredibly frustrating right now for sure. But the one thing I am glad of is that we have the money to cover the above expenses because we keep money aside just for situations like these. Every month I slide some cash away into accounts labeled: car, health, and house expenses. It hurts me to actually use the money in there but I am glad it is there for us to not have to panic about unexpected expenses. I use the word “unanticipated” loosely because most of us should know that random expenses will pop up when we least expect them to.

So I am grateful for past me for looking out for today me but man, it’s only the first full week in December and I am still staring down a bunch of social events this month (it’s also my birthday a week before Christmas). While they aren’t all events that will cost money, some are and I am ok with that. Because instead of griping about the cost, I am grateful that I have friends I can spend time with and that I have access to a variety of different places where I can be social.

On that note, I recently finished The Good Life and I highly recommend it! It isn’t heavy with data but more about the stories of people who have happy lives vs. people who have unhappy lives. I’ll give you the crux of it: having high quality, close, positive relationships throughout your life is the key.


* LOL metaphorically. I can’t run.
** I save for that all year round so it doesn’t really affect me but I have upped our budget because the social aspect of this time of year has become more expensive but I would rather keep those events in our lives especially post-pandemic.
*** I’ll let you decide if $237 is a fair price for a car wash (spoiler: nope).
**** No, we are not going to shovel it ourselves. The last thing we need is the only able-bodied adult to have a massive coronary.

Link dump

Link dump

Hello! I have been busy reading a GIANT pile of books I have taken out from the library as well as tackling some video games. I have been mostly pleased with my divestment from social media (do blogs still count? They used to). I have kept a few links that I’ve enjoyed lately so today’s post is just sharing those. Hopefully, something longer will be written soon.

Canadian personal finance
The best free retirement calculators in Canada.

Parents lack an RESP financial plan. “I crunched some numbers to find out the cost of going to university in Ontario…Taking an average of … four, I calculated that students need about $125,000 for a four-year undergraduate arts degree, if they live away from home.”

Society
Why kids are quitting sports.

Millennials say that they need $525000 a year to be happy.

Relationships
Social media is not your couples’ therapist. I have noticed similar advice for diagnosis’ as well. Accounts need to keep people engaged & constantly sharing to remain relevant and to curry favour with the algorithm. I have seen weirdly normal behaviours pathologized as being indicative of a problem. People repost these things because they’re relatable but I think a lot of them are relatable because they are things most of us do. There is a lot of self-diagnosis happening and it’s worrisome.

I just finished the book The Good Life and I highly recommend it. Here is a good primer on how to craft enduring happiness.

Further to that, I do appreciate the friendships I have with both older and younger folks.

How men can build better friendships