You may notice our 2021 Christmas letter is running a bit late — a whole year late, actually, since it’s now 2022. As I was about to push send, my Dad was admitted to the hospital with COVID, and he passed away Christmas morning. It left a cloud over the…

Dear Family and Friends, In December I decided to make my grandmother Rose’s Swedish coffee braid for the holidays. Maybe I was a glutton for pandemic punishment, but I realized I had so little time left to accomplish anything of significance, having wasted my quarantine time sipping wine from my…

There’s a pinch of my Mom’s cremains laying in my jewelry box, tucked inside a tiny gold-colored tear drop suspended from a chain. When she passed away nine years ago, I thought a necklace containing a little part of her would keep her memory close to my heart. I was…

That’s what Dr. Neil deGrasse Tyson told me. According to him, I meet all the criteria of a star headed toward its grand extinguishing. Okay, he wasn’t literally talking to me. I was watching an episode of Cosmos. But in my quarantine state of mind, he and I were having…

When my son Liam turned four years old, I made him a Bob the Builder cake for his birthday. I hadn’t planned to. In fact, as an unaccomplished baker, the thought never even crossed my mind. …

For six weeks I have lived in isolation, shunning the entire world to avoid running into a microscopic virus. But the quarantine hasn’t protected me from the continual outbreak of family drama. It finds me, no matter what kind of mask I hide behind or how much sanitizer I rub…