Happy Friday

It’s Christmas Eve!

Wishing everyone a Merry Christmas over the coming weekend. I hope your days are indeed filled with lots of great and meaningful experiences whether:

with loved ones or alone
away from home or if you managed to travel this year
it’s sunny or cold
your plans all went perfectly or things got cancelled on you
you secured a live tree this year or missed out

As we grow older every year, Christmas comes around so quickly to me but for my kids, it can never come soon enough. The way each of us experiences and perceives time is really fascinating! That Netflix Explained episode on Time made some intriguing observations about this phenomenon. What I found most interesting was how the quantity of new memories and experiences that we have has a positive correlation with our perception of time. So most of us tend to recall the largest amount of our lives was spent when we were children because when we are little, we experience the most frequent new memories and these memory deposits act like anchor points in time and affect our perception of time. We look back to being a child and because there were so many more memories from this time, it feels like time moved slower then.

Now that we get older, the sense of time moving faster also coincides with the infrequency of making new memories, which is a very common situation in adulthood for most people. There are less ‘points of interest’ in our memory bank to anchor our perception of time and so it often feels that the year just went by so quickly.

It makes sense when I see my kids. They have a daily sense of adventure and longing for new experiences. But as adults, we can often settle into the routine and especially with the pandemic, days rolled into the other and for many, it was a blur. My photo apps send me reminders of what I was doing at this time last year or 5 years ago and I’m filled with so much nostalgia and yet shock at how time has just disappeared.

So all this is to say that we do not need to just accept this age-related time phenomenon albeit perhaps out of our control sometimes. I believe we should learn from our kids to take life back and make efforts to create new memories and experiences every day especially with them so that we both can look back every year and think it was our best year yet.

After all, as they say, every day is a gift, that’s why it’s called the present.

Some fun links from this week…

Origin Story

A history of the origins of Christmas traditions including Santa Claus and Christmas trees. While we will celebrate Jesus’ birth for Christmas, people don’t really knows why this celebration landed on December 25!

Roll me a pasta

What was on your gift list this year? I have no idea what awaits me under the tree this year but I thought I would still dream about something that would really tickle me! This pasta shapes attachment for my Kitchenaid would be so awesome! My kids and I prefer shape pasta and honestly, this would be far easier to manage than the pasta roller which makes long strands of noodles that need to hung and dried in my tiny kitchen.

I scream cake

We finally made a trip to taste the gelato from Messina. It was a bit of an effort to get out there and we got seriously distracted en route (think puppy dogs running after pretty lights only it’s me chasing Christmas markets and local shops). The gelato did not disappoint. The choice of flavours, especially the weekly specials is so cool and impressively they also make cakes for special occasions. The display in the window is beautiful. I would visit just to see this eye candy. There’s a video inside to enjoy the making of these cakes and just the amount of work each one takes to make. Yum yum!

Convo topics

Today we will celebrate Christmas Eve with our church friends and something the grown ups like to have ready to go are conversation prompts for the dining table. Adventure in a Box provides free Christmas trivia themed conversation prompt cards. Head to the link to get a copy. I will be very intrigued to hear some of the kids’ (and grown up’s) answers.