Happy Monday! Christmas reading has started full swing around here – and I will show you my Advent additions to my holiday library on Wednesday (I posted them by accident last week and then pulled the post, but it will stay up this time). I spent most of the workweek over non-Christmas books – The Swallow: A Biography, by Stephen Moss (third of four books in his bird biography series, so I do hope he’s planning to keep it up because I’m running out!) and then Dear Mrs. Bird, by A.J. Pearce, which started in December but was definitely not a holiday book.

Once I finished with Dear Mrs. Bird, I switched over fully into Christmas reading and started with Calm Christmas and a Happy New Year, which I had out from the library. Nothing new or especially earth-shattering in there, but it was nice to spend a day’s reading getting some gentle validation for scaling back the winter holidays and celebrating in a way that feels meaningful to me – and not necessarily the way the media tells me I should celebrate. I think I’m generally pretty good at that, but a reminder is always nice. And I really liked the concept of a “Christmas constellation,” which gave me some stuff to think about for this holiday season and beyond.

With finishing up both Dear Mrs. Bird and Calm Christmas, I am out of unread library books and back to reading from my own shelves, and I knew right away that I wanted some festive mystery stories to kick off holiday reading – so I picked up Midwinter Murder, a collection of mysteries featuring all of Agatha Christie’s different detectives. Out of the twelve stories in here, five are Poirot stories and two are Marple stories, so this should be a very good volume indeed – I am about 40% of the way through it as of press time and really enjoying every entry. Nothing like a little crime for Christmas, right?

Finally – Christmas listening continues apace, too. I’ve actually slowed down a bit on the audiobook front, thanks to Steve setting up my Spotify account (yes, I am the last person on the planet to Spotify) which opened up a whole world of music options. I know, I know. But I’m gradually making my way through the stories and recipes in Jeanette Winterson’s Christmas Days and finding it a wonderful listen. I have about five hours to go in the audiobook, so a few long walks this week should finish it off. Now to see if that actually happens, since the kids have started their two-plus week Christmas vacation, oof.

I was hoping to have a skiing picture to share with you, but opening day at our local slope has been postponed due to not enough snow – sob. We’re waiting more or less patiently (okay, less patiently) for the mountain to open up, but in the meantime we did get in our (well, my) favorite Christmas tradition over the weekend: a walk around Old Town Alexandria to look at the decorations, especially the beautiful wreaths on just about every door, followed by cocoa from our favorite indie coffee shop. I’m pretty sure everyone else is just humoring me, but I do just love this tradition, which we’ve kept going for many years now.

What are your favorite traditions for the lead-up to Christmas? And what are you reading this week?