When I was growing up, my mom and I had a whole set of holiday rituals starting on December 1 with several paper advent calendars. They only had cute little pictures behind the doors, but I loved them. Every December 6, my mom would wake me wearing a crown of lit candles on her head to celebrate Santa Lucia’s Day. The tree went up about a week before Christmas and on Christmas Eve we would always eat three small fish sandwiches which she swore was a Swedish tradition. Not that we have an ounce of Swedish blood in us. Christmas morning played out like it did in most houses with stockings and presents and then piling in the car to go to a relative’s home.

Then it all came to screeching halt for like 20 years as I would always travel on Christmas and most years didn’t even bother putting up a tree. It was a little sad, but without kids, it was fine. I would parachute into someone else’s family (sometimes even my own) and skim on the surface of their traditions for a few days before flying back to my own decidedly non-Christmasy world.

All that’s changed since the girls showed up. Last year we hosted Christmas with one daughter, and now we’re in a new house with two girls. We even have a mantle for stockings and a chimney for Santa. R is 3 this year and she’s pretty excited about the idea of bounding down the stairs on Christmas morning to see what presents have arrived and if Santa ate his cookies and drank his milk. We have a hand-me-down train running around our tree and a whole family of advent elves hanging from the stairs. I’m super-excited to read The Night Before Christmas to the girls ON the night before Christmas.

It’s hard to underestimate how good it feels to be building our own Christmas family traditions, and I’m looking forward to fine-tuning the process for years to come.

I’m sure there are hundreds (if not thousands) of articles on the web about why one should (or shouldn’t) blog, but I think this is a very personal question. For me, the first (but not the only) reason is that I want to consume less and create more. Of course, blogging is something I’ve thought about for a long time and this article was the straw that filled the camel’s stomach.

I also feel the only way to write better and more comfortably is to write, and blogging is a natural and fun form of writing. I think it lends itself to the 15-30 minute chunks that I’m planning to invest. I tried Twitter a few months ago as way to scratch my blogging itch and the experience confirmed for me that tweeting isn’t writing. Even my tiny attention span is too long for Twitter.

But these two goals could have been accomplished with a personal journal. That didn’t feel right either, because I also aspire to providing entertaining, useful, and inspiring content, though achieving just one or two of these at a time is probably a more achievable goal. Having an audience also has perks: It’s a great incentive to not put out junk. You don’t even need an audience to get this benefit–just a potential audience. I’m also looking forward to hearing occasional feedback on stuff I write.

So what’s on the horizon? To be honest, this might be one of those projects I start that fizzles almost immediately. I almost named this Ghost Blog in honor of that possibility. But instead, I went with a more optimistically descriptive title because I have eclectic plans for this space. And while this is most definitely not a purely professional blog, I don’t plan to write anything that will prevent me from holding elected office.