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This is not a recipe blog, but when I make up recipes you should try, I’m going to post them here. I have a story about the cake, but it’s after the actual recipe because I’m not an animal.

Nine years ago I wrote this post called “Free but not cheap” that really resonated with people, about how parenting was a relationship, not a job, but that the jobs involved in parenting were often tedious and difficult.

This is all especially true during the holiday season*. There’s the feeling we’re all supposed to have (whether we celebrate Christmas or not personally) and then somehow in our culture that’s turned into family emotional work and you’re a bad parent if you don’t create a magical and wonderful season that your kids will have memories of forever.

That’s why I’m teaching this course, to help you deconstruct the relationship and the work of creating an experience, so that you can

• decide how much of an experience you’re willing to do the work to create,
• get very clear on exactly what is going to feel like love and magic to your specific people (in the class I’m going to lump your partner and relatives in with your kids as “your people”),
• make a detailed, actionable plan to do those things to create that magic and love so you can just do the things and not have a bunch of emotions about it,
• so you can save your emotions for the relationship part of the end of the year and not waste them on the jobs part of the holiday season.

That’s it. Basically I’m going to use concepts from the lean business model, Toyota Production Systems, love languages, attachment styles, core needs, and the Fascinate model (because I’m obsessed with the Fascinate model) to help you get extremely efficient about having an awesome holiday season that makes your people feel really loved and understood. You will be free to do the jobs of holiday parent really efficiently and accurately so you can have the space and time and energy to have the relationship part of the holidays on your own terms.

Bonus: I’m also going to talk about what to do if you yourself have a history of disappointment or trauma at the holidays and how to honor your feelings and need to not be all in about the holidays while still doing the jobs of Awesome Holiday Parent.

Another Bonus: I’m also also going to talk about why your kids, partner, whoever might really not like the holidays (even if they never had an overtly bad experience with them) and how you can honor that and not feel hurt or guilty about it.

(That class is this Thursday, November 18, 9 pm Eastern/8 pm Central/7 pm Mountain/6 pm Pacific on Zoom, recorded.)

But the flip side of this! The flip side of having the relationship and jobs of parenting being separate from each other is that the holiday season is peak time for the people in your life (more often than not these are your parents, siblings, or in-laws) to equate compliance with jobs and attendance at events with how much you love them. Basically, a lot of narcissists think that you have to show up for a long uncomfortable dinner to prove you’re a good daughter and that you love them.

That’s obviously not true. You can love someone an awful lot and really not want to have to sit through a booze-fueled dinner of things your kids can’t eat while your elders pontificate about Twitter trends they don’t understand. But, while you can teach your kids and partner about separating the relationship from the jobs, you are unlikely to be able to change minds and hearts of people who are determined to get you to jump through hoops to comply with their needs.

So I’m doing a second class on how to separate the relationship and jobs IN YOUR OWN MIND so that you can come up with a plan to make them feel like you’re giving them what they want, but without you having to put your whole heart into that compliance and breach your own boundaries.

Basically, how can you make them feel loved without actually jumping through their hoops in a way that would make you feel bad?

I’ll be working with love languages, core needs, attachment styles, the basic steps of dealing with narcissists**, and currencies/physical modalities to help you build a plan for pleasing your complicated people with actions, and leaving your emotions out of it.

Bonus: I’ll talk about understanding how the ties/tugs/guilts/restraints you feel with certain people might feel totally different for your kids, and also how to avoid replicating those bad dynamics for your kids.

(That class is next Monday, November 22, 9 pm Eastern/8 pm Central/7 pm Mountain/6 pm Pacific on Zoom, recorded.)

So this is a two-fer on separating the relationship from the jobs: one half sweet and creative because it’s for your kids and partner, and the other half clever and strategic because it’s for complicated people who would otherwise make you feel bad.

I would charge $129 for this two-part course, but I’m making it a pay-what-you-can (with a minimum of $18 as a good wish to me) so everyone can register. Sign up now:

Buy my product

* I keep calling it “the holiday season” and not Christmas, because the stress and expectations stretch from the day after Halloween through the new year and encompass U.S. Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, sometimes Diwali, any of the Scandianvian and Eastern European Christmas-adjacent saint-based holidays (Santa Lucia, Krampusnacht, St. Nicholas Day, etc.), sometimes Ramadan, Christmas Eve, Christmas Day, Boxing Day, Kwanzaa, New Years Eve, New Years Day, and onto Three Kings Day, depending on your own ethnicity and the dominant ethnicities where you live. Not to mention all the school, work, community service, social group, and cultural stuff you’re supposed to be doing.

** I’ve had people be hesitant to treat people as narcissists if they don’t know for sure that they have Narcissistic Personality Disorder. But the basic steps to dealing with narcissists are just specifically protecting your own boundaries, so if someone isn’t a narcissist those steps won’t hurt or have any effect on them and they won’t even notice them.

This is a discussion of section 5 of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, “Burning Sweetgrass.” For the discussion of section 4, go here.

Windigo Footprints

A monster myth, explained!

Question: What form would the monster version of what you’re most afraid of take?

The Sacred and the Superfund

This story of water is about genocide, bitter survival, and hope. It’s the flip of the beautiful meditation on water from the previous section, and asks us to take responsibility for harm done.

Questions: Are there things that can’t be repaired? What determines whether things can’t or can’t be fixed?

People of Corn, People of Light

This chapter, about the Mayan creation story of being the People of Corn, is about language and who tells your story. If you tell your own story, what language do you use? How does your origin story affect who you are right now?

Questions: The Mayan creation story was of how they became the People of Corn. Think about your own creation story. What are you People of?

Collateral Damage

Amphibians are collateral damage in climate change, and often go unnoticed by the people causing the damage. Humans suffer collateral damage, too. How can we become more intentional so we don’t cause any more collateral damage to other humans or any other living beings?

Questions: Have you ever felt like collateral damage in someone else’s war?

Shkitagen: People of the Seventh Fire

Wall Kimmerer’s father’s deep knowledge of fire and building fires is something he passed down not only to her and her children, but to other Native children at summer camp. He sees use for fire even when it is destructive. Wall Kimmerer wonders how we can take care of the world, even if we have to use fire to shape it.

Questions: Do you think we are in the Seventh Fire right now? DO you think there will be an Eighth Fire?

Defeating Windigo

Wall Kimmerer defeats the Windigo by using her plant medicine to make it sick and then heal it. If only she could defeat the neighbor who has destroyed her medicine forest.

Question: Is there a Windigo in your life right now?

Epilogue

This chapter about gathering, about ceremony, about responsibilities, about sustaining life, teaches us to be responsible and connected.

Question: Has reading this book made you feel any more connection to the land you are on right now?

This is a discussion of section 4 of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, “Braiding Sweetgrass.” For the discussion of section 3, go here.

In the Footsteps of Nanabozho: Becoming Indigenous To Place

This story of how the Original Instructions were given to Original Man asks us to interact with the earth in a specific way. The evil twin is Nanabozho’s foil, who gives Nanabozho the task of repairing the destruction the evil twin creates. This idea that we each have the potential for harm and repair is more nuanced than we’ve been taught to see good vs evil.

Question: If you had an evil twin, what would they bring to the earth that you are in the process of repairing?

The Sound of Silverbells

This chapter made me think about how interesting it’s been to watch my kids develop their own beliefs that are so radically different from mine, and how important it’s been for me to allow them to come to their own beliefs without stressing about it.

Questions: What do you know instinctively that your children don’t know? What do they know instinctively that you don’t?

Sitting in a Circle

I love cities. I have lived in cities most of my life, and the countryside feels much more scary to me than cities do. So I identified with Brad in this chapter, and tried to let Wall Kimmerer let the plants teach me, like she did with her students.

Question: Where do you feel most comfortable and free?

Burning Cascade Head

The salmon know, and there are things that we are supposed to know to do in cycles. When our places and cycles are disrupted, we don’t necessarily know how to create new cycles that serve the same purpose as the old ones.

Questions: How do the salmon know when to come and when to stay away?

Can you always go home? What would make it safe for you to go home?

Putting Down Roots

This is the most important chapter in the whole book, to me, because it teaches us how love and tending living things carefully can erase decades of death and destruction and damage. What a lesson about making things whole again, even 100 years later.

Question: Have you ever repaired anything you thought was damaged beyond hope? How?

Umbilicaria: The Belly Button of the World

This is another lesson about reciprocity, and about symbiosis. Can we quiet down to observe the delicate lichen? Can we quiet down to observe reciprocity?

Questions: Have you explored symbiosis with your children? What do they think about it?

Old-Growth Children

This meditation on how to interact with trees teaches us about perseverance and planting for generations. I could smell the fir and cedar as I read the chapter.

Question: Have you used products from trees other than wood?

Witness to the Rain

I just love these meditations on scientific topics that I thought were boring in their usual presentations. She makes the movement and properties of water come alive for all the senses, and feel like a gift she gives us.

Question: What sounds do you associate with water?

This is the discussion of section 3 of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, “Picking Sweetgrass.” For the discussion of section 2, go here.

Epiphany in the Beans

Such a simple question, “Do you think the earth loves you back?” But it really frames the idea of teaching your children not just to love but to accept love and reciprocity. Wall Kimmerer, of course, is talking about the land, but it makes me think of all kinds of other things we put love into and could accept love back from, if we knew to.

Question: What are you teaching your children to love and to welcome love in return?

The Three Sisters

This was such a beautiful, lyrical reflection on corn, beans, and squash, on complementary planting, and on interdependence.

Question: What are you interdependent with?

Wisgaak Gokpenagen: A Black Ash Basket

Wall Kimmerer talks about learning to make special traditional baskets from black ash trees, which are disappearing because they haven’t been tended enough by basketmakers. It’s interesting to go beyond an obvious interpretation that black ashes are being over-harvested to the nuance that they could be tended and grown by the same people who are harvesting them.

Question: Is there any kind of resource that you see disappearing that you could tend to help it flourish?

Mishkos Kenomagwen: The Teachings of Grass

This discussion of women having to code-switch to be taken seriously by white male institutions about their own held knowledge made me think about being in business school and the emphasis on “hard skills” that have no more value in actual business settings than “soft skills” do. I started then teaching my cismale children to be quiet and listen more deeply to figure out who knows what and how they know it, and not to trust the shape of things.

Question: Have you had to switch into more official language to talk about things that you know to be true?

Maple Nation: A Citizenship Guide

“You take what you’re given and you treat it right.” This is a very different code of citizenship than the codes of citizenship of other nations.

Questions: Would you want to be a citizen of Maple Nation, with the added responsibilities and lessened legal rights?

What do you think about the idea that enjoyment is a form of responsibility?

The Honorable Harvest

What a beautiful chapter with such important ideas. The Honorable Harvest rules are a good template for raising good humans who live in harmony with others and in happiness inside themselves.

Question: Have you thought about teaching your kids a code like the Honorable Harvest? What principles are in it?

1. This is the discussion of Robin Wall Kimmerer’s Braiding Sweetgrass, section 2: Tending Sweetgrass. To see the discussion on Section 1: Planting Sweetgrass, click here.

Maple Sugar Moon

Wall Kimmerer explores the idea of doing a task that was an annual ritual for her ancestors–collecting and boiling down sugar maple sap into syrup–with her young children. She contrasts the ways the trees created the sap and the ways humans collected and processed the sap. She sees boiling sap one year with and for her children as a way to mother them into her culture’s rituals.

Near the end of the chapter she reveals that her children remember that episode as being so much work for them, even though Wall Kimmerer was the one who sat up all night tending the fire! This seemed to me like a classic parenting outcome–giving so much and having the kids remember it totally differently.

Questions: Have you done something in a traditional way that is done more efficiently or commerically now? What did you learn from doing this project?

Is there something your children see radically differently than you do? How do you reconcile that?

Witch Hazel

This is the story of Wall Kimmerer’s neighbor Hazel Barnett, who lived near them when they lived in Kentucky. This chapter is told from the point of view of Wall Kimmerer’s daughter (she doesn’t say which one). The chapter talks about friendship as a form of stewardship, and interweaves taking care of land and plants and animals with tending a friendship and caring for an elder who can’t manage logistics anymore.

I thought this chapter was so sweet and beautiful, and it felt special because we hadn’t heard anything about Wall Kimmerer’s parents being present in her life during that part of her life. Intergenerational friendship isn’t an obvious theme in our culture. By positioning this as being by her daughter, Wall Kimmerer gets three generations out of the story instead of only two.

Questions: Do you have any intergenerational friendships in your life? Have you considered the value of intergenerational friendships before?

Have you done any life management for elders in your life? How does it make you feel to be needed in this specific way?

A Mother’s Work

This chapter tells the story of Wall Kimmerer trying to make a real home for her daughters, with a pond on their property as the central project that needs to be completed (in her mind) to makes things really Home.

Of course, the pond is much more important and compelling to Wall Kimmerer than it ever is to her daughters, who grow up and leave home before she feels like she’s really cleared it out enough for swimming. But the struggle seems perfectly matched to Wall Kimmerer’s area of expertise, and it’s also impossible to win, whereas we see that Wall Kimmerer and her daughters are already home to each other.

Question: Do you have a pond in your life? Something you think you have to fix to be a worthy parent?

The Consolation of Water Lilies

“I had known it would happen the first time I held her–from that moment on, all her growing would be away from me.”

This chapter, about her children leaving home, hit me hard because I read it right when my own first child had left home. The paragraph about feeding every creature that lived with her, and all the plants and even her car, made me laugh in recognition. I love that, too, and I know a lot of us do.

The second half of the chapter, the unfurling of Wall Kimmerer’s being fed not only by the pond and the water lilies, but also by her sister-cousin, is a beautiful reminder to me to notice who has their hands out to me and is feeding me.

Question: Are you at the stage yet of being able to enjoy having to feed everyone? Or are you still feeding creatures so helpless that the pressure doesn’t give you any space?

Who or what feeds you?

Allegiance to Gratitude

This chapter was a big reframe for me in how I want my kids to see their daily struggles. I think I’d been raising them to feel like they were in opposition to the Republicforwhichitstands, as Wall Kimmerer calls the dominant system. But what if I could take the attitude of being thankful participants in ritual and community without buying into the dominant system? That would give my kids a good life without having to sell themselves out.

Question: Who or what do you feel allegiance to?

For the past two years I’ve been following a checklist of things to do and eat that have kept me from sinking into my normal winter numbness and inertia. It’s felt really good to be able to be present and feel good on a daily basis. So this year I’m inviting anyone who wants to to follow my checklist with me from November 1 (first day of the fall time change) through March 31 (those first two weird weeks back from the spring time change). It’s five months, 151 days, and it takes about 70 minutes a day for me. I’ll help you modify the checklist for yourself (I take some supplements you might want to take different varieties of, and you’ll need to choose what type of daily practices to do in different categories) and then we’ll just do it. I’ll have pins made and everyone who makes it through to the end with only ten missed days will get a pin. I’m charging you money for it, $75 so you’ll keep going and won’t just drop out after the first week or the first time you skip doing it.

There is, of course, no guarantee that doing this list will keep you above water with your mood. But it definitely won’t hurt, and just the consistency alone should help keep you from spiraling away during the untethered icy weirdness of February and from thinking you’re the only one who feels a little weird about all the flashy stuff in December. I’ll have a Discord server that you can join if you want to talk about it with anyone.

This is a challenge about being kind to yourself, not about being hard-core.

I’m opening registration on October 15 so you have time to set up your own checklist and be ready to start November 1.

Also, I will be doing a readalong here on this blog of the book Braiding Sweetgrass by Robin Wall Kimmerer. The subtitle of the book is “Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge, and the Teachings of Plants,” but it’s actually about being a kind, thoughtful parent who sees the long view of the world she wants for her children and what she wants to equip them with. I had a lot of affirming and learning thoughts about my own parenting while reading it, so I hope you get something good out of it, too.

Discussion schedule:

November 30, 2020: Discuss the “Planting Sweetgrass” section, Preface through p. 59

December 30, 2020: Discuss the “Tending Sweetgrass” section, pp. 61-117

January 29, 2021: Discuss the “Picking Sweetgrass” section, pp. 119-201

February 26, 2021: Discuss the “Braiding Sweetgrass” section, pp. 203-300

March 30, 2021: Discuss the “Burning Sweetgrass” section, pp. 301-386