(A Few) of My Favorite Yuletide Things

 Not my real house...wait, can they do that??

 By the time I arrive home in Maine tomorrow evening, it will have been the longest I’ve ever been away. Considering I spent a semester abroad in Denmark, and now live only a short flight down the east coast, this is quite impressive.

If by impressive I mean, unbearable. I miss home.

As my anticipation for Maine and the holidays mounts (along with my homesickness), I’ve relied on some of my favorite things to get me through those Christmas blues and keep the spirit of a Maine Christmas alive here in the city. (Sure, we have the tree at Rockefeller Center, the Nutcracker by the New York City Ballet, and one of the largest Santa-suit pub crawls in the world…but do we have Christmas trees made entirely of lobster pots?? Um, no. No we do not). 

So in celebration of heading north tomorrow, and to get me through one.more.day, here are a few of my favorite Yuletide things!

My favorite Christmas scarf (courtesy of my brother, Ian): It's super cozy and gives my usual black-on-black NYC uniform a pop of festive color. I've worn it every day since Thanksgiving...er, Halloween...er, okay fine, Labor Day.

Good Maine Folks: The Down East "Maine For the Holidays" issue arrived just before Thanksgiving. I cried. Check out the aforementioned lobster pot Christmas tree.

Snowflake Bentley Christmas ornaments: We started collecting these as a family years ago, and now we all have them on our own trees. They come out with a new one every year, and they remind me of colder, cleaner climes. (Read more about Snowflake Bentley here — pretty sure we were separated at birth!)

My pup, Tucker: He loves Christmas and snow as much as we do. Lucky for me, he's also my mom's favorite photo-bombing subject, so I get constant puppy pics no matter where I am!

Christmas Shows: I know I know, this isn't specifically a Maine thing...but I like to keep my holiday calendar booked with Christmas shows and festivities (here, Carnegie Hall for the Vienna Boys Choir) to keep the spirit alive, no matter how bust the season!

Forever Plaid

There is nothing more comfy and comforting than crawling between soft flannel sheets at the end of a long day. Or changing out of your stuffy work clothes and pulling on a worn flannel shirt with leggings. It’s the same feeling that I get when I step off the plane at PWM after a brief but typically stressful flight from my (current) home in New York City – the air smells, tastes, feels different. Like home. 

That is what flannel (especially of the plaid variety) means to me.

Bliss, is that you?

Anyone you knows anything about me knows that I am a Mainer, a Maineiac, a native of the north – and am darn proud of it. I consider myself extremely fortunate to have grown up there, between the mountains and the sea, and I find almost any excuse to bring it up in conversation. That’s easier to do here in New York than you might think; I am constantly running into people who summer in Maine or went to summer camp there as kids, and for those people Maine holds a very special place in their hearts.

As for the others, those who haven’t been so fortunate as to experience the Pine Tree State? Not so much. I get a lot of “Wow, you’re a long way from home” (not true – it may be psychologically worlds away, but in actuality is only a 50-minute flight up the coast). Or, more often than not, a blank look followed by: “What’s up there, exactly?”

As my opening quote says, "what's up there" is no secret if you’ve ever lived there. But if you haven’t, I hope that this blog will give you a glimpse into the wonderful world of ME…and me.