Category: Parenting

Please Enjoy My 2026 Holiday Card

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Exactly on Time

Beach-themed illustrated title card for "Please Enjoy My 2026 Holiday Card." Subtitle: "Exactly on Time." By Jackie Pick.

Hello. It is June and this is my holiday card. Why? Because I did it last year and now I’m trapped by my own nonsense.

Besides, December is overloaded with holidays and various observances. It is the junk drawer of months. June has capacity for dumb stuff like this new tradition of mine.

Many traditions are just questionable decisions that gain momentum. This is how icebreakers, Elf on the Shelf, and Rob Schneider’s career got started.

Anyway. Greetings. Happy Asteroid Day, Outfit-of-the-Day Day, Frozen Yogurt Month, and Accordion Awareness Month however you celebrate.

(Is anyone unaware of accordions?)

Dearly Beloved,

We gather here today to squint at the smoldering crater where the first half of 2026 used to be and see if we can identify any remains.

Rest was once again on my 2026 to-do list. Are you familiar with Rest? People always recommend it. “Get some Rest,” as though Rest is something I should pick up next time I’m out running errands. Wonderful. Where is it? Is there a form? Does it come in bulk? Send me the link.

Thus far in 2026, I have acquired no new hobbies. I’d like to thank myself for that. I also did not renovate any part of my house, body, or mind. Nor did I write the Great American Novel (or the Terrible American Novel.) This is either existentialism or executive dysfunction.

Back in April, I accidentally did a squat.

Spring made a brief cameo appearance here in the Midwest before being escorted off the premises by eighty-seven consecutive weather emergencies. There were tornado warnings, air quality alerts, severe thunderstorms, tentative thunderstorms, and at least one day when outside felt like the inside of a crockpot. (Meteorologists are encouraged to fact-check me in their own annual holiday card, which I assume is called “Warm Fronts.” )

Yes, I consult the weather app frequently. I don’t know why. The weather app has never once improved the weather.

Unfortunately, the world is still producing horrific headlines at a rate normally associated with cocaine usage, and we’re still expected to keep up with household chores and careers and Duolingo and figuring out whether consciousness is emergent or fundamental.

Human beings were not designed for this. Human beings were designed to get excited when we spot a delicious non-lethal berry in the wild.

Still, we persist. Perhaps humanity’s greatest tradition is committing to ridiculous things.

From the Office of Glorious Offspring, my children continue their relentless campaign to grow up. I support this in theory, while also distinctly remembering teaching them things like “this is how to use a spoon” and “don’t lick shopping carts” and “that’s not how pants work.” It’s beautiful. I hate it. I am thrilled. I am devastated. I am proud. I am confused. I am excited. I am worried. These are not opposite things.

I am handling this magnificently, obviously.

The dog also persists. His monthly tradition is to shed enough fur to create an emergency backup dog. He is the household’s resident barbarian king, and we love him.

Clearly, love is just deciding that someone’s nonsense and fuzz is worth celebrating.

Surprisingly (and against mounting evidence) I continue to write. Writing is strange because much of it looks exactly like not writing. Then, somehow, words appear. Occasionally I gather with insanely talented and profoundly kind writers, which is fortunate because writers require regular contact with other writers. Left unattended, we wander into the woods and become lichen.

Writing is my nonsense and fuzz.

As is customary in holiday cards, I shall now announce resolutions that have absolutely no chance of surviving until Labor Day. There are but three:

  1. Learn to distinguish between “This is interesting” and “I now own three turnip-specific kitchen gadgets.”
  2. Avoid arguing with fools unless the audience is exceptional.
  3. Be punctual with holiday-related blog posts. I’m already drafting my Arbor Day piece. The jokes do not write themselves.

Traditions are the nonsense we decide to keep. Some are inherited and some are accidental. Few make much sense and most make life better.

And so, I present to you THIS BERRY for your excitement …

Close-up of a ripe wild strawberry.

…and some thematic music for the rest of your Asteroid Day.

May we continue to commit to the bit.

May: No Reason and All the Reasons

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May is here again. This is the true end of the year. May is supposed to be spring but it’s actually harvest season. We see what has survived and what has grown. We cull what we can. We return year after year to witness the fact that time has continued to move.

Every year I’m surprised, although I own and use a calendar. Several, in fact. Still, I’m flattened by the rush of endings and the gatherings stacked atop one another. Cut off one celebration and two grow back in its place, fastening ever more ceremonies around your neck like beautiful cursed jewelry.

May gathers up loose threads with brassy pomp and circumstance before summer upheaval arrives with its wet bathing suits.

May is a complete disaster, is what I’m saying. Just look at the inside of my car if you need proof. My Toyota is a rolling evidence locker. A midden heap.

The rest of you, though? You look great. Hydrated and moisturized while you’re winding down, as it were. I salute you. May your linen pants remain crisp and your drinks be as lemon-wedged as you wish.

Me? I’m choking down noises that sound like a 1987 Buick trying to merge while going uphill.

I’m not cute enough to be winding down. May is about endings. Lasts and finals. All I can do is listen to one of my sons tell me that by the time he leaves for college, 90% of our time together is done. I’m not checking that math, thanks, because I’m busy remembering carrying him in after he fell asleep in the car, all dead weight and impossible trust

At night I collapse onto the couch so dramatically that heretofore missing objects launch out of my bra upon impact. Bobby pins, receipts, Cheez-Its, Chapsticks with missing caps. I am not proud of this, but leave it here for future historians who may appreciate the data.

I almost just typed, “Still, I love this time of year.” But I don’t. I mean, I recognize the ache of it, even if it knocks the wind out of me. I recognize that sense of subjective slow motion when something is ending. I recognize that my children have become themselves gradually, then all at once. That they have developed complex, glorious, kind lives, and I get to celebrate and make banana bread for them. No-reason banana bread. All-the-reasons banana bread.

Mostly though, it’s because I’m overbuying bananas these days. They darken as we rush to and from events. I always think we’re a household that will eat many bananas. We are not. We are a household that transforms bananas via neglect into baked goods.

We recently played Jackbox as a family. The prompt was “What is the name of a horse you wouldn’t bet on?” I answered “Last Place Monty,” which got me an appreciative snort from the kids, a noise I will cherish, to some extent. One child answered, “Beefs Wellington.” That won. The next day he wandered into the kitchen and lamented, “I should have gone with ‘Thelonius Glue, Sr.’”

There are entire sections of motherhood no one adequately explains beforehand, including the fact that one day your children may become funnier than you, and that you will feel a piercing gratitude for that.

Every week I begin my planning journal by writing “Do not waste your precious timing giving a single crap about what anyone thinks of you.” This is excellent advice that is fundamentally incompatible with motherhood. There are a few people whose opinions matter to me. My husband. My kids. The dog who watches all of us in case we sneeze weirdly and he needs to retreat. The cashier who sells me bananas when he absolutely should know better at this point.

Loving these people (not the cashier. Ok, maybe the cashier. Hey, Jerry.) requires presence, vigilance, mood-monitoring, remembering who needs new shoes and what size, and who suddenly likes bananas again.

And every May, no matter how tired we are or what strange treasures are embedded in my underthings or in the Toyota’s backseat, we all somehow find our way home. Banana bread. Better versions of jokes. It’s some holy version of “WTF.”

Motherhood/Sainthood/Sandalwood

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Devotion, Exhaustion, and Three-Wick Messaging

Oof. The things I’m seeing about Mother’s Day. The things I see every year. Every day.

We try to turn motherhood into sainthood. Or vice versa.

Bear with me because I don’t know a lot about sainthood, and I don’t have an exhaustive understanding of motherhood, but “exhaustion” and “motherhood” are two words that, if I am ever turned into a school worksheet, will be included in the word bank.

Candles are involved in both sainthood and motherhood, especially this time of year. Big Candle may be trying to sell us on something a little rank.

Don’t get me started on Big Bubble Bath, Big Pedicure, Big Buffet, and Big Five-Minute Power Nap.

(For the record, I love most of those. Try to tear me away from a good buffet and I will ruin your hairdo.)

They want to offer us something utterly restorative in the time it takes to pumice off whatever barnacles have grown on our feet as we walk, run, crouch, wipe, shuttle, rescue, worry (oh, the worry!), and attend in every meaning of the word. A little something instead of space to sit with how wonderful and how hard it is. We get to trail our fingertips in “wonderful” and are told that the “I’m exhausted and doing my best” commentary is something private, something publicly unutterable unless you’re willing to, in the same breath, bring it back to the tonic chord: “But I love my kids.” Amen.

Our expressions of depletion via devotion don’t mean we don’t love our kids.

Quite the opposite. Because why else would we do it?

It’s the love.

It’s the love.

It’s the love.

This love, though? It’s superhuman, and we’re only human, so we try to breathe a little without inhaling the three-wick Cashmere Woods messaging that we’re adequate as long as we’re perfect.

It’s ok to have all sorts of words in your word bank.

Your kids are lucky to have you. We’re lucky to have you raising your kids.