ANTICIPATION

Libby K. Hanaway
Dec 3, 2025
11 min read

Updated: Dec 17, 2025

In my tightly-packed, overstuffed brain, there's space to give my full attention to just one holiday at a time. In November, I’m all about remaining loyal — maybe piously so — to comfy, reliable, humble-brown Thanksgiving. It's all turkey + pie + pine cones before I'll even think about embracing the bright razzle-dazzle of the Christmas holiday season. That said, as soon as we're home from Thanksgiving in Chicago, I immediately dial up my favorite very-chill holiday music to start making my lists and checking them twice.

Whether you celebrate the baby Jesus Christmas or simply enjoy the general festivity of the season, there's always a lot to anticipate. Advent calendars — centrally featured in late-fall store displays everywhere — nicely encapsulate the countdown spirit of the season. Though Advent calendars of yore were made of simple flat cardstock with tiny numbered windows revealing exactly zero chocolates, body lotions, dog treats, or Bonne Maman jams, we four Kennedy kids felt like household big-shots when our turn to open a paper square came around every four days. In the Christian faith tradition, the four-Sunday Advent season holds a quiet, hopeful expectancy, which I guarantee was not our vibe as antsy Advent calendar-opening kids; we were more about anticipation and its jittery, jazzy flutter of expectant excitement.

Holiday anticipation is best — and most authentically — expressed by kids big and small, who tend to have limited responsibilities and unlimited wish lists. It’s all Elf-on-the-Shelf anticipation all the time. For adults — especially parents stretched thin in the busiest parenting years — the anticipation gets muted by the nonstop obligation, but it’s still there thrumming in the background, ready to be let loose.

AN ANTICIPATION EXCEPTION (with another one further below): If you are an Amazon delivery driver or a Target employee or Rick, whose business revolves in large part around a holiday peak-season (for him, a gauntlet of logistical and operational challenges that begins on Cyber Monday and ends December 23rd), this may be the mood of your anticipation:

Our front-yard, face-planted snowman from 2016 captures the December spirit of just about everyone in his company and anyone else in holiday-logistics-and-gifting fields. Take heart — January is coming.

For people unencumbered by all-consuming holiday-season employment, the eager anticipation can be one of the best parts of the season. What am I anticipating this year? Here’s my anticipation list, which stays very stable from year to year:

SNOW: I was impatiently anticipating our very late first Colorado snowfall of the season, and then we finally got it … in Chicago. On Saturday of our Thanksgiving weekend, the fat snowflakes started drifting down in the very early hours, then picked up speed and just kept going such that each of the five young adult cousins traveling to Chicago for the weekend had a change or delay in travel back to work or college. Snow is beautiful ... but disruptive … but still beautiful!

And TODAY our first real snow of the year finally fell here on the Front Range. It was only somewhat disruptive (we weren't going anywhere anyway / C postponed her dinner here until tomorrow) and is still fully, hushedly beautiful:

LIGHTS: Everything — truly everything — is made better with twinkle lights. Driving at night down our town’s main street — bejeweled this month with big white snowflakes dangling from lampposts and walnut-sized lights glowing in the trees — feels like its own holiday event. After today’s still-falling snow, maybe we’ll take a sightseeing drive down Public Road tonight for the ultimate December combo of glittering lights + fresh new snow. If so, I’ll add a pic right here ⬇️.

(Added: we just got back!)

DECORATIONS: Opening the red and green plastic bins each year is like saying hi to old friends. Hello stockings knitted by my mom! Hello squirrel holding the gold-glittered pine cone! Hello popsicle stick ornament I made in 1973! I love pulling out each item and putting it in place on a shelf, on the kitchen counter, or hanging on the tree. Like clockwork, I know that by January 3rd every bit of bright magical sparkle will feel like unbearably clunky clutter, but for now, here on the very front end of the season, it’s all freshness, merriment, and memory.

HOLIDAY CARDS: The first holiday cards in the mailbox always stir the same mix of 85% happiness + gratitude and 15% efficiency-envy of the early senders who completed their December USPS project before I’ve even ordered our cards or considered a Christmas letter theme. December is a great time to be Type A, which I am not.

LOGAN’S CHRISTMAS SHOPPE: This annual multi-day church event is as much about creating a great experience for local parents + guardians as it is about making sure kids have gifts to open on Christmas morning. Community members in need push carts through towering shelves of LEGO sets, scooters, stuffed animals, science kits, and Sephora gift cards to select exactly what their own kids would like to open on Christmas morning. With music + lights + giant inflatables + cookies + hot cocoa + gift wrapping + more, it all feels genuinely festive.

Two years ago I sat chatting with a mom for 45 minutes after she very thoughtfully and deliberately selected gifts for her six-year-old daughter. This woman had such an interesting story and was working so hard to meet the needs of her family and community. I walked away with overflowing admiration and still often think about A., especially at Christmastime.

CHRISTMAS COOKIES: Yum, so very yum. Cookies for breakfast, cookies for lunch: it’s all just fine in December. We are going to a cookie exchange on Saturday and will have fresh cookie insights to share. I’ll be talking about Christmas cookies here next week, so be sure to check back in.

FIRETRUCK SANTA: This has become one of my peak moments of holiday anticipation since moving to our current town. I clear the calendar so we can be outside with the neighborhood kids who wave wildly at the Big Man on the firetruck making his way through town. I tear up every year as the sirens start blaring in the distance, knowing the mounting excitement and wonder out on our chilly, grassy cul-de-sac island is pure and true. You can find us out there on Tuesday, December 16th between 5:30 and 5:50 p.m. Our neighbor will probably have extra hot chocolate for you.

CHRISTMAS EVE/CHRISTMAS DAY: Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in our house is all about low-key comfort: an early, chaotically-casual kids' service at church; high-appeal / low-effort food (overnight egg casserole, gluten-free cinnamon coffee cake, make-ahead gf lasagna, gf chocolate peppermint cake); pajamas around the clock (except for Rick, who is always in jeans + a quarter-zip early Christmas morning); It’s a Wonderful Life, which we all know by heart; gifts + stockings; a fire in the fireplace; books; naps; puzzles; and, if we are feeling very motivated, maybe a game or two. We gave up on traveling for Christmas many years ago, and so it’s always a quiet, extremely indoors, family-foursome (plus C’s cat Pea) affair. After all the hoopla of the season, the Big Day is actually our biggest day of mellow decompression.

BONUS CHRISTMAS: Because none of us wants to face any sort of transition greater than couch to chair to table to bed on Christmas Day, we have a follow-up Christmas on 12/26 at our nephew + niece-in-law’s house in Denver, with additional local and visiting family always included. Everyone except Rick and our nephew B. stays pajama-ish; our grand-nephews L1 + L2 (ages 7 + 4) are still amped up on Christmas energy and we all bring food for a really great feast. So so good.

OF COURSE … not every holiday season has a happy spirit of anticipation, and some years you just have to pivot or simply take a pass. [C was very sick at urgent care on Christmas Day 2022, and the ghosts of Sickmases Past hover at the edge of our memories.]

If you anticipate a difficult holiday season or if your December takes an unexpectedly difficult turn, I hope you can find some light wherever possible, even if it’s just the smallest flicker.

My mom — my wonderful, vibrant, Christmas-loving and Christmas-giving mom — died on December 17th twelve years ago from pancreatic cancer. She had been especially sick the month prior and her memorial service was on December 23rd, so the entire season was heavy with fear and sadness followed by dense foggy grief and a gaping hole of loss. No one in my extended family was much up up for celebrating anything that year, and whatever effort any of us put into our respective Christmases was strictly on behalf of our kids.

Only after many years and some solid therapy can I say I look forward to — and anticipate — December 17th. Always while wearing my mom's cream cable-knit cardigan, I now carve out time to “be with” her throughout the day with four personal, annual assignments:

1. I make tapioca pudding. Growing up, my mom always made tapioca pudding for us kids whenever we were sick; for me, it’s the definition of comfort food. [It's a definition that skidded to a stop for most (but not all!) of our next Kennedy generation ... which is fine because those serving sizes do not go far.] Despite their own hard-line rejection, our girls know and appreciate that every December 17th I will pull a box of Minute Tapioca from the pantry, and Rick or I will make a batch on the stovetop. Then I will sit with its steamy, vanilla-y goodness and remember.

2. I will read her emails. I have all sorts of handwritten notes and letters from my mom, but in the busyness of December, I usually just sit down and scroll to my "Mom" folder of emails. We were mainly phone-talkers, but emails were great for recipes or updates on birthday shopping for the girls, and they always included extra nuggets like:

a.) a self-deprecating comment on her golfing or bowling that week

b.) a review of a dinner she + my dad hosted that week: ”I made chicken cacciatore and hey, it wasn’t too bad!”

c.) a remark about the Cubs’ recent wins or losses (more losses than wins, as you might guess)

d.) a mention of the shirts she found on sale for my dad at Kohl’s that week

3. I will watch a Hallmark movie or two. In their later years, my mom and dad loved their December evenings with a comfortably cheesy Hallmark movie on TV as their Christmas tree and small Dickens' Village buildings shone brightly in the background. Honestly, I am a bit of a Scrooge with Hallmark-type movies, but I always make an exception on December 17th. After several years of viewing, so far Holiday in the Vineyards (technically Netflix, not Hallmark) is one I would re-watch with its winsome widowed, single-mom lead, its garagiste wine culture, and realistic details like watching nighttime TV in striped socks + glasses that are rare in this genre. You do have to push through the first 10 minutes, but then it comes into its own. I just came across this Hallmark Christmas movie ranking from Variety, so maybe this year I will try one of their top picks and report back. Do you have a favorite?

4. Finally, I will bake a batch of pumpkin bread because just before her last week — in the most Judy Kennedy act you could imagine — my mom made her way to the kitchen counter to chop pecans for the family-recipe pumpkin bread she asked us to make for the hospice volunteers who were there to help take care of her and her dearest friends who came visiting to say goodbye. That absolutely ironic, perfectly Judy kitchen-counter chopping effort fully sums up the lovingly stubborn, ever-hospitable, giving-all essence of my mom; pecans and pumpkin bread will always mean more

Sometimes — as it happens — we anticipate things we could never anticipate anticipating 🩶.

With December’s generous range of beliefs, traditions, memories, and expectations, there’s a lot to anticipate. I hope you’ve been able to start this month with a full measure of your own very good anticipation ✨.

EXTRA GOOD

ALSO LINKED THROUGH THE EXTRA GOOD PAGE HERE

WEDNESDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2025

1._GOOD PRODUCTS + COMPANIES: For over two decades, I have been a proud, glowing, non-official, self-appointed brand ambassador for glassybaby. Were I ever to share a Holiday Gift Guide like everyone else online (unlikely, but still), glassybaby would have its very own, top-of-the-list category. If you live anywhere in the Pacific Northwest, chances are high that you have a glassybaby (or ten or twenty) in your home. If you are new to glassybaby both as an item and as a company (both with a lower-case "g"), I will try hard to capture its substantial magic.

A glassybaby is a chunky, shiny, hand-blown glass votive candleholder made and sold in the company's original Seattle-neighborhood hot shop and now also in Livingston, Montana; there are three retail-only shops in WA and OR, and you can always find them on their website, too. The original designs from the early 2000s were mainly solid color ranging from translucent to semi-opaque. Glassybaby has since expanded to beautiful drinkware, vases, and swirly-patterned candleholders, but I remain partial to the simple, original, one-color beauties.

I wholeheartedly endorse glassybaby for three reasons:

First, the candleholders are beautiful unlit and mesmerizingly beautiful when lit, and — if you're a tactile person like me — so smoothly holdable, which is generally not advised for a live-flamed candleholder but nearly impossible to resist in real life. Also, each hand-blown glassybaby is unique with slight variations in size and color even within the same color grouping. If you are ever able to visit a glassybaby location in person, half of the fun is pulling out nine of the same color, setting them on the counter, and lighting them on site to see which one says YES to you the loudest. (Ordering online lacks this particular magic, but don't let it stop you; also, in case you're not into candles these days, the re-chargeable evie tealights are quite amazing). Here are a few pics + a flickering video from my collection:

Second, although some can be pricey*, glassybabies are weighty, meaningful gifts, especially when you want to recognize someone special like a teacher who has poured into your child, a friend going through a painful stretch, or a colleague who goes above and beyond. With names like kindness, hope, begin again, strength, silver lining, and thank you, the glassybabies themselves can reinforce your intent and meaning. My Eastside Seattle friend Kelly — Nordstrom Cafe Kelly, as I mentioned here — is so beloved by so many that she has a deep, wide windowsill packed with a thick rainbow of glassybabies. When I look at my own glassybabies, my mind immediately links to each friend who gifted me and why. *For a (somewhat) more affordable option, check the website for any upcoming "perfectly imperfect" seconds sales — good deals to be found if you're flexible on on a flaw or two.

Third, the company is focused on gifting forward and giving back. Glassybaby's brand slogan is one of a kindness ... and YES, it's true! 10% of each sale goes toward an ever-growing rotation of nonprofits; glassybaby has given over $16 MILLION to more than 2,000 organizations to date. The company's founder, Lee Rhodes. a three-time cancer survivor, started glassybaby in 2001 after experiencing the power of light through her own diagnosis and treatment. This video shares the glassybaby story in a beautiful way:

Just last month, to celebrate its $16 millionth dollar donated, the company launched its Light It Forward campaign, with a goal of giving away 16,000 glassybabies to individuals impacted by cancer. Anyone — for instance, you right now — can nominate someone in their life who's been touched by cancer; selected recipients each receive a glassybaby, and, in turn, they can send light forward with a glassybaby delivered freely to someone they know who also has been affected by cancer. The website has a running tally of the glassybabies given away so far, and it features a brief scroll of encouraging messages written by givers to their glassybaby giftees, as well as posts + notes from givers AND giftees. If you can take sixty seconds right now to read some of these words, your holiday season will be lit up with hope for people you don't even know.