Books are the best gifts to give and get, I say! Indie bookshops — the beacons of light that make our communities more alive — have really hurt in 2020. Let’s do our best to shop there first. When you shop at Bookshop.org a portion of your purchase goes both to indie bookshops all over and the work I do, at no extra cost to you. This is a great way to support the work you love with the gift purchases you’d make anyway. However — if time’s running short and you need quick shipping, or if you’re making other purchases and want to consolidate — I get it. I’ve also got those same recommended book ..read more

The quote “Beauty will save the world” from Dostoevsky’s The Idiot is often misunderstood to mean the surface appeal of things matter most. So long as the world around you looks lovely, the world is alright. Boots on the ground, this idea looks more like recognizing the actual beauty in all things, even if they don’t seem lovely at first glance. It means choosing to believe, even during the ordinary liturgy of living life, that beauty is there, underneath the cracked surface of all we see. When we choose (because it’s indeed a choice) to recognize the inherent beauty in a creation bestowed by ..read more

I’ve dusted off and republished this list of 20 reflection questions for the end of a year for ten years now — almost as old as this blog itself. It’s quite fitting that it’s the penultimate post! Here it is again for you to use this year, and the next, and the next, and the next… And check back tomorrow for AoS’ final goodbye post. It’s been an incredible 12 years, and I’m glad for every minute of it. (p.s. I’m not going anywhere.) /// It’s time for our annual 20 Questions! I re-release it here around every New Year’s Eve, and I love hearing how you all use it. After tweaking and adjusting t ..read more

Keeping up with my monthly series in 2020 as a slow farewell to AoS, today I’m sharing my final letter to myself in 2010, ten years ago. Though these are to addressed to me, my hope is that you find a just-right smidge of truth, beauty, and goodness. Perhaps this exercise will inspire you to write your own letters to yourself, ten years younger. Dear Me in 2010, I don’t quite know how to begin this or what to say. It’s my final letter to you (at least published here on AoS). When I was you, I think part of me thought AoS would last one week at a time, depending on my mood and the weather, and ..read more

One of my favorite songs this time of year is “In the Bleak Midwinter.” It’s based on a poem that Romantic poet Christina Rossetti wrote in 1872. Considering that Jesus was born in the Middle East and likely not in winter, I’ve always seen the first verse as a beautiful metaphor. Jesus came into our world when “earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone.” The imagery wouldn’t have the same effect if the poem was called “In the Joyous Midsummer.” Christina Rossetti is not alone in using the starkness of winter for dramatic effect. In art and popular imagination, winter is frequently a metaph ..read more

If I’ve said it once, I’ve said it probably ten times during the past decade-plus here on AoS… Shop small and local when you’re able, shop larger when you need to. I completely get there are times when we need to shop online for gifts, guilt-free. And even better — there are ethical brands represented on Amazon, where you can also take advantage of Prime’s quick shipping. If you’ve still got gifts to buy and you’re feeling flustered, take heart: I’ve collected for you a few ideas from reasonable brands, found on Amazon. Books First off, books are the best sort of gift — I’ve already curated s ..read more

I probably had a sleeping baby nestled in my arms the first time I happened upon the website then known as “Simple Mom.” I was struggling mightily through those first months of motherhood, overwhelmed by the loud voices telling me how I should be parenting. Simple Mom was different. It was about motherhood…sort of. It was more about the intentional crafting of a life. I immediately subscribed (ah, the good old days of Bloglines), and spent the new few naptimes catching up on the relatively limited list of archived posts. I was hooked: on the website, and on its winsome writer, Tsh Oxenreider ..read more

Finalizing (!) our series during this final year of AoS of the top 12 published posts of all time (measured in simple traffic numbers), this one is officially the most popular of all time on this website. I wrote it when we were living overseas well over a decade ago, and people still read this daily. Daily! That makes me happy. (Heads up, parents: I know everyone says it goes fast, but it’s true. That grumpy toddler pictured at the bottom of this post is sixteen.) xoxo, Tsh The Countdown: 12 / 11 / 10 / 9 / 8 / 7 / 6 / 5 / 4 / 3 / 2 / 1 “Mom, can I watch a movie?” This is how I woke up this ..read more

For my final post on The Art of Simple, I thought that I would share what’s on my good list, a list of what’s making my life a little sweeter these days. An Idea At the beginning of 2020, I started a page in my bullet journal labeled, “Yays.” It’s something I’ve done for several years. Sometimes the label is “Wows” or “Whoas,” but this year it was “Yays.” The intent behind it is when I get to the end of the year, there will be a whole list of Yays to remember. (In hindsight, maybe the Yays should have been Whoas this year!) Little did I know what 2020 would bring and how hard it would be to a ..read more

I’ve run a holiday gift guide almost all 12 years of this website's life, and while I still love giving you ideas for ethical gift-giving (and thus supporting companies that do good work), I admittedly didn’t have the bandwidth or time this year, what with Shadow & Light’s release. So this year — for AoS’ final year, mind you — I’ve decided to showcase my favorite thing ever …books. I believe books are just about the best gift to give anyone. You’re giving the gift of other worlds, other ways of thinking, encouragement, inspiration, humor, healthy escapism, and art. Not much better in my ..read more