It’s a rainy Christmas Eve here in Atlanta–not necessarily the precipitation I associate with Christmastime! But let’s be honest, snow is pretty, but it’s also a hassle. I’d much rather read about it or watch it in a movie than actually deal with it. And it seems like every time in snows in fiction, something beautiful or magical happens.

I used to be a bit of a scrooge. I’m not sure why, exactly, but every year in college my friends would get excited about Christmas music and all the cheesy traditions and I felt sort of bah humbug. I usually would finally feel like I was in the Christmas spirit on, oh, December 26. A little too late. This year is different, though. I started thinking about gifts I wanted to buy people before Thanksgiving even hit, and I’ve been willingly listening to Christmas music! I’ve even watched three Christmas movies and enjoyed them.

Over the weekend I was browsing on Hello Giggles and ran across this list of YA books to get you through the winter. I had read the John Green collection listed first and loved it, so somewhat on a whim I bought the second suggested collection of stories. It was way above my typical buy price of $3.99 for a Kindle book, but I was feeling Christmas-y, remember? And you know what? It was worth every penny.

I’m not usually into short stories, either, but these were great. As for the John Green, think Love Actually–seemingly unrelated stories that end up colliding. And the Stephanie Perkins collection was a lovely, diverse set of stories that included magic, romance, and some of the quirkiest relationships I’ve ever read.

If you’re looking for some light, heartwarming reading for this evening, look no further!

• Let It Snow: Three Holiday Romances by John Green, Maureen Johnson, and Lauren Myracle

• My True Love Gave to Me: Twelve Holiday Stories edited by Stephanie Perkins

On a completely different holiday literature note, I’ve been waiting for Holidays on Ice by David Sedaris to come in at the library. I just got a notification that it was in, but my branch is CLOSED today! So maybe I’ll extend my Christmas spirit by a few days this year and give that one a read after the fact.

Are you into holiday-themed books and movies? What are some of your favorites?

Christmas is just a few days away, and I know a lot of us may be scrambling to pick up those last few gifts and get the ones we already have wrapped. The free printable I have for you today should be an answer to any of a couple of dilemmas you may have.

Dilemma 1: I bought someone something virtual, like a Kindle book or a magazine subscription, and don’t have anything tangible to put under the tree.

Dilemma 2: I want a cute way to label my gifts, or a card to drop in with a package, but I’ve already overspent my budget and don’t want to shell out for a card.

Everything is cuter when it’s miniaturized, and this envelope and notecard set is no exception. Read on for instructions and to download a template!

• Step 1: Print the template on regular weight paper and cut it out. The big square with divots in the sides will be your envelope, the smaller square will be the notecard, and the circle can be either a label for the front or a seal for the back.

• Step 2: Pick out the paper you’d like to use as your envelope. This can be anything you have around! Wrapping paper, construction paper, scrapbook paper…the world is your oyster. I used a 12x12 square of heavyweight scrapbook paper.

• Step 3: Trace around the edges of your cut-out envelope template. It doesn’t have to be perfect! Once you start folding you’ll find the shape to be very forgiving.

• Step 4: If your paper is big enough, go ahead and trace a second envelope template. You can also choose to trace the notecard shape onto the corners of your page if you have the space.

• Step 5: Take your cut-out envelope and begin folding. Using the indents as your guide, fold the left triangular piece toward the center and stick a tiny piece of tape on the point.

• Step 6: Fold the right triangle onto the piece of tape in the center, and stick another piece of tape on top of it. (You could also use a small dab of glue or a glue stick if you’d prefer.)

• Step 7: Fold the bottom triangle onto the piece of tape in the center and press it down. Give all the edges a good crease with your fingernail to make them crisp!

• Step 8: Fold the top triangle, the last one remaining loose, down toward the center and crease it into place. Don’t stick this one down until you’ve put your note inside!

Write your note on the included square notecard and pop it into the envelope. You can use the circle template to make a label for the front, or as a seal for the back (stuck down with a piece of tape or glue).

I can’t tell you what it is yet, but I made an awfully cute project with 12 of these sets as a Christmas gift for my husband. Check back after the big day for a full post on that one!

Ready to go? Click the image below to download your copy of the mini envelope template and get to gifting!

I am a sucker for gift guides. I LOVE giving gifts, I LOVE getting gifts, I LOVE thinking about the perfect thing for each person I care about. I’m probably the one person on the planet who actually pages through all the catalogs that come in the mail. I save them up until I have the brainspace to enjoy them. Catalogs are perfect breakfast reading!

So you can imagine that I really like planning for Christmas, and I really like online gift guides.

But not all gift guides are created equal!

When selecting a gift guide, I look for ones from blogs, magazines, or websites I trust, whose values or preferences align with mine. I like consumable gifts, and I’m also trying this year to support local shops and buy mostly handmade items, so I search for companies that promote those.

It’s also useful to think about the people you’re shopping for. You can narrow down specific types of stores to hunt gift guides in. For example, my father-in-law is big into backpacking, so a guide from REI would be great.

PSA to the makers of gift guides: if your guide is a slideshow, and I have to click through 50 Unique Gifts for Women, you will lose me. I may be willing to click a couple of times, but as your page slowly loads in between each click, my mind will start to wander. And when I hit a slide that’s an ad? I’m out. Unfortunately a couple of sites I really like, including Real Simple, make their gift guides this way. Womp womp.

Instead of a slideshow, show me pictures of all the gifts in a grid. Make the pictures clickable. Put a caption on the picture so I know what I’m looking at. If you do that, your gift guide wins, and it makes me happy.

Separate out your gift guide by category - Gifts for Him, Gifts Under $25, Gifts for the Hostess - and let me select the one that appeals to me most. I’ll be honest, I’m a fan of the “Gifts Under $25”…

Don’t be afraid to think outside the box! Maybe you found a wonderful gift guide back in February. Just because it’s a list of Valentine’s Day gifts doesn’t mean you can’t give one of the items to your husband for Christmas. Personally I’ve always found it weird to give someone a Christmas-themed gift at Christmas, anyway, because then they won’t be able to use it until the following year!

Ultimately the best gift guides are the ones where I actually click through to some of the items. That obviously depends less on the user experience and the layout and more on the store’s content. Without further ado, a few of my favorites:

• Crate and Barrel - It’s not a local store, but the items are high quality, and I found numerous items (specifically from the “Our Favorite Gifts” list) that I ended up adding to my “Gift Ideas” Pinterest board.

• Etsy is the mecca of all things handmade. It’s eminently browsable on a normal day and especially nice around the holidays.

• Zingerman’s offers high-quality edibles galore! Some really unique stuff there, too. It’s a little pricey, but everything I’ve ever had from there has been delicious.

• I love the websites The Sweet Home and The Wirecutter for their product reviews, so it follows that I appreciate their gift suggestions. This is last year’s list, and I’m waiting with bated breath for the 2014 edition!

Others of note:

• Ten Thousand Villages, a great fair-trade store

• Uncommon Goods

• I just discovered mouth.com and I want everything!

Sometimes a great gift guide just gets your creative juices flowing. I love when bloggers post lists of gift ideas. Usually if I enjoy the blogger’s writing in general, I’ll get some great ideas from their gift lists! This is a different class of gift guide: not hosted by a store, not necessarily encouraging me to shop anywhere in particular. And I may or may not end up getting exactly what the list suggests. But it gets me thinking, and helps come up with related ideas that may be more perfect for someone I love.

• Modern Mrs. Darcy got me thinking about stocking stuffers.

• The Pioneer Woman kept a running category of posts about items she loves that she then grouped in a “Holiday Gift Ideas” tab.

• I searched “gifts” on Yes and Yes, and the results included several posts that look like great gift-planning fodder.

Gift guides turn me into a kid in the candy store, but the store is the Internet and the candy is pretty pictures. It’s practically as satisfying to me to browse beautifully laid out selections of gifts as it is to actually buy or receive anything. And by flipping through, I’m often pleasantly surprised to find just the thing to gift to someone on my list.

I haven’t been to my birth state in close to two years. The state where I spent 17 years of my life, the state that saw me fall in love, fall into grace, learn to read, learn to swim, make friends, lose friends, become myself. I don’t have any family ties there anymore, and I’ve lost touch with many of my friends from that time in my life (or those friends have moved away, too).

*Photo Credit: http://welcomesignproject.wordpress.com/tag/mississippi-welcome-sign/

And look, I’m from Mississippi. Mississippi has plenty of shit wrong with it. But Alabama and Georgia have shit, too. New York and California have their own, if different, shits. Probably even the paradise of Hawaii has its shit.

But there’s a siren song in the letters Mississippi. It’s not like I’m the first one to try and capture it. William Faulkner supposedly said, “To understand the world, you must first understand a place like Mississippi.” Maybe it’s true. Maybe that slow muddy river carves tracks into our hearts. Maybe the humidity makes us malleable, reshapes our psyches, worms its way into our pores.

I am not Mississippi anymore, but somehow I am still Mississippi.

And so my heart resonates when I hear a song about her, my state.

Just for fun the other day, I searched “Mississippi” on Spotify and sifted through the results. I got a lot of North Mississippi Allstars songs, and a number from the Mississippi Mass Choir (and a few from Mississippi John Hurt) that I ruled out. My criteria was that Mississippi needed to be in the title, and it needed to be a focus of the song. A few of these I knew, more of them I didn’t. Some are sweet, some are weird, some are more raucous than others. I was a little surprised by the number of them that weren’t country! I left some out that I just couldn’t even–Afroman wasn’t doing it for me, nor was Ray Stevens’ Mississippi Squirrel Revival. And I assembled this list of Mississippi.

If your heart too sometimes yearns for that place, if Mississippi will always be your home, then this list is for you.

Look, some of the songs are about the river, not the state. I’m aware of this. But seeing as how that river forms one border of my state, I’ll claim it. Thank you very much.

Yesterday on the train I noticed a piece of candy on the floor. I noticed it because I kept hearing something rolling around and I was curious what it was. When we started moving, it would roll backwards, behind me somewhere. When we stopped, it would roll back toward me, and I’d catch a glimpse of it, a little orange sphere, maybe a Gobstopper or something. As we rocketed down the tracks it would go side to side a little bit, sometimes here, sometimes there. It was so small and inconsequential that it was completely at the mercy of the movement of the train. While I sat in my seat and barely noticed much motion, it was propelled all over the place by the slightest shift.

Photo Credit

Poor little gobstopper. What if it was trying to get to the front of the car, or to the seat where a cute boy was sitting? What if it really wanted to be near the heater below the right-hand window, or in the seat nearest to the door in order to exit the train quickly? It had no control over where it was going.

Look, I know it sounds silly. I’m aware that a gobstopper doesn’t have a brain and it couldn’t really have been thinking any of these things. But it kind of made me think about how I’m like that little piece of candy sometimes: going about my days, shifting gears as circumstances dictate, not sure what the big picture is.

I’m really good at reacting, at diving in to put out fires, to handle things after something has already happened. Some days I feel like that gobstopper, rolling around, not in charge of my own destiny.

That’s a little dramatic, but it’s true. I want to have a 5-year plan. I want to have a vision. I want to be able to make sure that decisions I make today, actions I take this morning, are part of a larger whole.

To that end, I’ve been meeting with a friend of mine who is conveniently also a life coach for young adults trying to discern their career paths. I’ve always had a really hard time dreaming big, because I tend to get caught in the logisitical weeds. That’s a valuable skill to have a lot of times, and it makes me a great contributor to teams I’ve worked on, but I need to be able to step outside of that and see the forest. Without that, then I can’t be sure that the weeds I’m pulling are the right weeds, the weeds that will lead to fulfillment for me, the weeds that will help me end up in the place I want to be, as the person I want to be.

So I’m zooming out. It’s not easy. It sort of stinks sometimes to see yourself in light of your quirks and flaws. It’s weighty stuff, and it’s not like I’m ever going to completely replace my personality and my preferences with new ones. But I think I can learn how to dream, and I think I can stop being a gobstopper.