Carrie Classon

Nothing is as fun as eating broccoli and breaking bad habits “I bought more broccoli because I knew you were coming,” my mother informed me. You can never get enough broccoli, that is my belief. I am lucky in that I never had to acquire a taste for vegetables out of some sort of concern…

I was excited to wear my new dress. It was slimming, I thought: all black and covered with flounces from the neckline to the hemline. I wore it with high heels—which I rarely wear—and red drop earrings. I was feeling much more sophisticated than I usually do when I went over to my sister’s house…

The New Year is when we take stock. In some cases, like my husband Peter’s, this is literal. He keeps an inventory of our canned goods and chastises me if I mess up his inventory. “Did you mark off the black beans?” “Um, no.” “You have to mark it off on the list or I…

My Uncle Andy recently turned 90, and it was hard to imagine what a guy would like for his 90th birthday. At 90, getting a lot of new stuff doesn’t sound very appealing. Andy is in the process of getting rid of stuff, a job made more challenging by the fact that neither he nor…

“It’s not about luck,” my friend Andrew insists, “it’s about gratitude.” Andrew is not some sort of New Age guide, in case you were wondering. He is a slightly curmudgeonly tax preparer and not given to feel-good platitudes. He was refuting what I had said, which was that luck has played a significant role in…

I walk around my neighborhood later in the evening these days, mostly so I can see the lights. There are some impressive houses just a mile or so away, and I walk down the sidewalks and see what has appeared on the lawns and in the windows now, right before Christmas. Some of the houses…

Yesterday I bought a Christmas tree at the hardware store. I thought it was a good day to do it both because I’d heard the rumors of Christmas tree shortages and because it would keep me away from my email for more than an hour—a near record in the last two weeks. No one tells…