Have you noticed the pace has picked up this month? When you step into a mall, the frenzy is almost palatable. People scurrying around, desperate for the perfect gift, worried that they have forgotten someone, and distracted by the myriad of colors and choices on display. Bright lights, big stress!!!

The holiday season is meant to be about love, joy and sharing. Somehow the combination of generosity, obligation and tradition with a healthy dose of commercialism has created a mindset that is antithetical to the intention behind the actions. There is a contagious element to the frenetic holiday vibe too. The good news is that we get to choose how we will be about the holidays.

Our family has some Swedish heritage so our big family event is Christmas Eve (although, now that I think about it, we also have Christmas Day brunch and turkey dinner on Christmas Day. So we actually had 2 full days of activities… Funny how we can tell ourselves something that sets a frame when the reality is actually wider.)

Anyhow, we have certain Swedish things that have always been part of our family tradition on Christmas Eve like sil (pickled herring), potatiskorv (potato sausage) and spritz (little shortbread cookies).

Ah Project Clean Sink…. This has been sitting on my whiteboard for a few months now. Here’s the scoop. I wear several hats (don’t we all?) and several of those hats have an email account or list attached to them. Each one has its own bunch of email groups, newsletter signups, account notifications, etc. that accumulate quickly and fill up my inbox. There are a number of reasons why this built up… I had one account forwarding to my main account… I filed one and the other backed up with the duplicate… I switched to gmail and wasn’t familiar with the tagging system vs. my familiar Outlook folders… It has been an incredibly full year… blah blah blah blah blah… Bottom line is this (and it is challenging to write this in public):

I have 15,875 email messages in my inbox and 6,575 unread messages. No kidding. Beautiful divisibles of five at this very second.