THE CASE FOR JANUARY

JUMP TO EXTRA GOOD

Happy New Year, everyone!  Did you all make it through the holidays okay?  Highlights? Lowlights?  I did not intend to have an extended holiday absence here at Here’s One Good Thing, but amid the many holiday highlights, one lowlight (which happened right in the middle of a highlight) involved knocking over an empty water glass while telling a story, holding a spurt-y hand wound above my heart as directed by my visiting friend who takes first aid training every two years; downplaying it all to E, who looked on, pale and stricken; spending a few late afternoon hours with Rick on Christmas Eve Eve at a not-so-urgent care (packed with flu-people — stay healthy!); and returning home with two beautifully-sewn stitches in my left hand.  All’s well that ends well, and now I’ll have a memorable, smile-shaped scar where my palm meets my wrist — my one and only tattoo.  Shout-out to Rick who (with assists from E + C) cooked, baked, and washed every single dish from 12/23 through 1/1.  He’s the GOAT!

Anyway, thanks for your patience!  We’re back to regular programming here!

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Are you a January person?  Does it feel fresh, clean, and full of possibility?  

Or does it feel dismal, cruel, and infinitely blah?  

I can see how January might feel like a gloomy, grayscale let-down after all of December’s multi-colored action.  I can further see — especially if you live in arctic zones like Buffalo or Chicago — how January provides limited distraction from the cold slush, the itchy outwear, the miserable early-morning ice-scraping, the dirty snow.  There’s only the sense of being stuck frozen in a dreary seasonal purgatory until the early-April thaw, and that can just feel … harsh.  If this is you, I hear you, I see you, and at different times in my life, I was you.  But I have since defected to the sparsely-fielded but warmly-committed TEAM JANUARY.  Yes, January is a punchline, a cross to bear, a collective seasonal groan, but I happen to LOVE January, and below I make my case for why January is actually GOOD.  

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1. JANUARY IS AN EXHALATION [🥳 ➡️ 😮‍💨 ➡️ 😌]

December can be fun, LOADS of sparkly fun.  But also: all that fun and sparkle does not effortlessly sprinkle down from the North Pole.  I remember what our kitchen looked like back in the grade-school through high-school era, roughly two days before the girls were home for winter break: it was an explosion of cardboard boxes for final-deadline shipping to distant friends and family; Barnes & Noble gift cards and food gifts for teachers; spools of unspooling ribbon; scissors and tape hidden under wrapping paper; regular flour spilled on the counter; gluten-free flour on a safer, farther counter; powdered sugar dusting the floor; and teetering stacks of Christmas letters/cards that still needed mailing.  Here’s a relatively mild December 18th still-life scene from 2014. I just checked: it was the Thursday before break, which totally tracks:

[Now that I look more closely, all the mess is actually a very accurate December 2014 time capsule: scattered ingredients for Muddy Buddies plus the chocolate-y bowl in the sink; the book Quiet by Susan Cain (for the introvert in your life); sugared pecans cooling on the cooktop; TCU acceptance/welcome guide (which E had been waiting for since 6th grade); the yellow Stanley box cutter still in our current kitchen; flowers in memory of my mom, who passed the previous December; the Seattle Times plus our weekly local newspaper; the well-used red plaid hot pad that was actually from a kids' pretend cooking set; the girls' colored-marker-ed index card notes to cousins and probably teachers; the VERY SAME sturdy drinking glass I cut my hand on this year; and more. I generally cannot handle a mess like this for more than two hours, but it becomes a very nostalgic game/treasure hunt when you try to piece everything together eleven years later 🔎]

When everything was finally off to school, to the neighbors, to USPS and UPS, I would sit there in a daze, feeling slightly defective and very, very tired, vowing each year that the next year would be different.  I knew there were fellow adults with better pacing and stronger executive function skills, but I still did not understand how they pulled off this marathon month so smoothly and cleanly.  To this day, it remains a mystery!

It seemed to me as though December always required one very deep, extended, lung-expanding inhalation before diving into the deep end of its celebration streak.  Long, long ago I was a swim team kid, and I remember that last giant gulp of air before launching off the scratchy starting block.  It turned out to be solid training for other sprints in life, December being one of the prettiest, shortest, most lightweight, and most opt-in/opt-out of life’s regular pushes.  Low stakes aside, as soon as the Thanksgiving turkey platter is stored away, I know once again it's time to fill every milliliter of lung space with efficiency-boosting oxygen.  Summertime parents know that having fun while swimming, diving, and paddling is physically exhausting, which is why they smartly-subversively take their kids to the pool to WEAR THEM OUT.  The Adult Swim of December is no different.

But then comes the mellow hush of January 🧘‍♀️.  The calm, quiet, white space of January is the signal to get out of the pool — legs quivering, hair dripping — and wrap yourself up in a clean, fuzzy towel.  Then you can plop into a deck chair, stare off into the distance, and finally exhale.  You can just sit there, exhaling and exhaling until your breathing is finally settled.  Then it’s time to shake the water from your ears and head to the locker room where your warm, dry clothes neatly hang.  That’s January for you.  

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2. JANUARY IS A BLANK PAGE 📋

December’s calendar is all loud, zingy, messy exclamation points‼️

January’s is all zen ellipses . . . calmly awaiting whatever comes next 🧘‍♀️

I love calendars, both online and paper, and both for planning ahead and as a record of past events.  In my 2025 paper planner, I can flip back just one week to see all the scribbles, the cross-outs, the arrows, the yellow highlighter, the add-ins, the rescheduleds, the uncompleteds.  It’s a densely-penciled web of festivity and deadlines.  But now look at January 🤩:

This vast, clean space says freedom and possibility!  This vacancy feels liberating!  It’s the briefest blankness — tonight I’ll finally start filling in the squares and lines of 2026 — but in these early January days I relish these glorious wide, open spaces.  The year will fill up with birthdays, appointments, work commitments, travel, and calls to the plumber.  But right now there’s the smallest pause as the calendar asks, “Hey, you!  What do you want this new year to look like?”  Rarely does the year go as planned, but this brief sense of lush possibility is positively intoxicating (in a Dry January kind of way 🥛).  

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3.  JANUARY RESTORES AND RECALIBRATES ✌️

December and January seem very yin and yang — they each know their mission and keep one another in steady balance.  For all the fun excess of December — the food! the wine! the gifts! the parties! — there’s the vague, back-of-mind reminder that this buffet of holiday abbondanza cannot continue without consequence (debt, clogged arteries, sloggy fatigue, and more). But until the bill comes due, it's easy to just keep going ... which is why I still find myself enjoying an every-evening appetizer with the dwindling remains of Trader Joe’s white Stilton with cranberries like there’s no such thing as LDL (yeah: LDL who?). But even as I smear another round of crumbly cheese on a cracker, the January in me knows, she knows. January keeps an eye on the long game and gently reels you back in. 

January has the reputation of being a repressive, no-fun-zone scold; instead, what I hear January saying is this: “Maybe just lie down and take a little break, hon.  Maybe clear that one counter.  Maybe eat an apple.  You’ll feel better.”  This kind of calm, favorite-teacher voice nudges us to pack all of December’s glittery bits back into storage, to return all the fridge + freezer Tupperware back to cupboards + drawers, and to go ahead and finish the Stilton but not buy more (it’s a seasonal item, which helps). This voice reminds you about books and puzzles and board games and low-key photo projects to consider. This voice says, "Sit down and relax, why don't you?"

Maybe January feels mellowly reorienting v. harshly restricting because I don't go hard with resolutions or extremes.  January has never been a Whole30, triathalon-bound, New Year/New You sort of month for me.  No flash, no dash — just easy-going, incrementally-improving moderation.  I have hopes, goals, improvements (this is the year December will run smoothly 🤞), and suggestions to myself — always shared around the table at our family's annual New Year's Day lunch — and that's the sum of it.  I'll try!

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January’s no-fuss moderation is why on our wide open, early-January Sunday morning last week — with E + C + Pea returned to their own lives and our floor and counter space cleared of Christmas clutter — we drove right past the fully-packed parking lot of the fancy new local fitness center on our way to an easy hike (actually more of a walk) 20 minutes from home. 

Saturday night's Wolf Supermoon still hung big in the sky, and the early sun lit the Flatirons bronze-y orange just as we got started.  It felt like a perfectly-prescribed start to the new year: fresh air, slight challenge, nourishing nuts + sliced apples in the backpack.  Completely on track. But when I fished out the bag of nuts after the walk/hike, I did a gleeful double-take: Rick had combined the heart-healthy, omega-3 nuts with the last of the buttery, high-sodium Chex Mix we make every year for the late-December college football bowl season.  Rick's mix felt like the very essence of January’s restorative moderation … in a nutshell.

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POLL: ARE YOU A JANUARY PERSON?

• 0%Yes, I am! It's so chill and relaxing ✌️
• 0%Nice try. It's a long, hard, cold slog 🙄
• 0%I'm with Rick: "Well, I'm not ANTI-January" 😶
• 0%You've changed my mind! I'm gonna do a puzzle tonight 🥳

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EXTRA GOOD

ALSO LINKED THROUGH THE EXTRA GOOD PAGE HERE

WEDNESDAY, JANUARY 7, 2026

1._GOOD SPORTS:  I have mentioned here before that two in our family — Rick and E — are hardcore sports fans. They especially love college football, and they especially love TCU football, home of E's alma mater and continued site of devotion. C is indifferent about sports and I am generally just along for the ride. With football, I occupy myself with enjoying the band, marveling at nimble running backs and high catches in traffic, wincing at bad hits, stressing about CTE, feeling for the kickers that miss in final minutes, observing the coaches for high or low EQ, railing against sports betting, lamenting the disloyalty of the transfer portal, and warming my heart when players from opposing teams hug each other after the game.

So I’m a mixed bag fan-wise, but the three of us tuned in, of course, for the Alamo Bowl on 12/30/2025 when the Horned Frogs were up against heralded and favored USC. From the start, there was a fairy-tale element to the game: the Frogs' backup QB Ken Seals — in for the regular QB who entered the transfer portal — was starting his first college game in two years and his first ever for TCU. Seals grew up not far from TCU's Fort Worth, TX campus and had been a lifelong Frog fan. It was a fun, made-for-TV story, but I worried for him: big stage, bright lights, high expectations, limited experience. I could have saved my motherly anxiety for another night because, thrillingly, Seals — as Rick shouted out — "Sealed the Deal!"

I'm not sure you will find me sharing football footage here ever again, but this late-game Ken Seals-Jeremy Payne sequence was actually sports poetry-in-motion. Everyone knew it when they saw it. On social media, there were call-outs to name this play. My favorite suggestion was the "Alamo Tip Toe" 👟👟.

Here's what what one analyst wrote about the clip below:

And here's the clip (click to play) ↘️:

(For mobile, you might need to click on the white section below the image to start the video. I do not know why!)

And here's the reaction of QB Ken Seals (click to play):

(For mobile, you might need to click on the white section below the image to start the video. I still do not know why!)

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MAY YOUR 2026 HAVE AT LEAST ONE MOMENT FILLED WITH A KEN SEALS LEVEL OF SHOCK, THRILL, GRATITUDE + WONDER

HAPPY NEW YEAR, ALL!!

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SEE YOU HERE NEXT TIME FOR

ANOTHER BATCH OF GOOD

😀