Christmas Isn’t Wrapped in Paper

Pokémon cards, cousins, and choosing memories over stuff

Every other year, our family flips the holiday script.

On odd years, we head north to Wisconsin for Thanksgiving and stay put in Austin for Christmas. On even years, we do the reverse. This year is an “odd year,” which means we’re settling into a slow Texas Christmas. No snow. No winter boots. Just Texas December days warm enough for shorts and flip flops.

It’s a different rhythm than the Christmases I grew up with, but it’s one I’ve come to appreciate. A little quieter. A little slower. Less rushing. A bit more room to think and notice things.

One of the things I can’t help being reminded of this holiday season is how much my kids want stuff.

My six-year-old son is laser-focused on Pokémon cards. Not toys. Not games. Just cards. Shiny ones, specifically. He’s deep into collecting, trading, organizing, and proudly announcing when he has a “better card” than his sister. And while Pokémon cards do bring him joy, there’s something about spending most of a Christmas budget on a few dozen small rectangles of cardboard that feels… fleeting.

Especially when I watch what actually happens after the excitement fades.

Walking Santa thru the Pokémon Collection - 2025 

Most of the cards get sorted, compared, and then set aside. One or two special ones get slipped carefully into a binder. And then he moves on.

My daughter, at eight, has a slightly longer list. A few things that feel more substantial. But even with her, I can sense that tug toward more. More gifts. More boxes. More stuff to open. It’s hard not to feel that pull as a parent, too. We want to give our kids everything. We want to create magic.

But lately, I’ve been trying to slow myself down and ask a different question: What actually lasts? What do we really need?

A few mornings ago, over breakfast, I asked my daughter what she really wanted to do during Christmas break. Without hesitation, she said she wanted to see her cousins. Her Wisconsin cousins. The ones she doesn’t get to see nearly enough. She said she wished they could come to Austin for Christmas.

What she didn’t know was that, perhaps subliminally, I’d been planting that idea for weeks. That one of my sisters had already decided to plan their winter break trip down to Texas. So just a couple of days after Christmas, my daughter’s wish is coming true. Four cousins will be piling into our house, filling it with noise, laughter, and chaos. My kids and the cousins won’t find this out until Christmas morning, until they unwrap the gift from one another letting them know they’ll be seeing one another in two days <3.

My daughter had been working a full itinerary in her head since the last time her cousins visited, one that can’t be fit into five days. Zilker Park. Downtown adventures. Maybe the Hill Country. Enchanted Rock if we can swing it. And then, to top it off, a few nights near Fork Lake east of Dallas for New Year’s Eve, where the kids will run around, fish, play games, and stay up later than they should.

It’s a smaller version of what I experienced growing up. Christmas Eve at the farmhouse. Forty-plus relatives crammed into one place. Loud conversations. Kids everywhere. The kind of gatherings where you don’t remember who gave what gift, well other than those couple of years when stuffed pantyhose dolls were the craze and my grandma gifted one where you could very clearly see Santa’s butt crack.

But what did stick were the moments. The people. The feeling of being together and not the stuff. The thoughtfulness of the gifts. And definitely not which gifts were the most expensive or luxurious.

Thinking about the tension of kids wanting things, parents trying to balance joy with budgets, it reminds me of some of the work we’ve been doing this year with the Texas Forward Party around affordability in some of our campaigns. Polling from the University of Texas / Texas Politics Project has consistently shown that affordability is one of the top concerns on Texans’ minds right now (66% are very concerned about food and consumer prices). Not abstract policy debates, but everyday questions: groceries, rent, childcare, gas, and whether the math still works at the end of the month.

Standing there thinking about Pokémon cards and Christmas morning, it hit me that this isn’t just a parenting moment. It reminded me that it’s something families all across Texas are quietly navigating, trying to create meaningful moments without letting the pressure of “more stuff” crowd out what actually matters.

Little elf Christmas card assembly line of 2025

So on a hopeful holiday note, the most meaningful parts of the holidays aren’t the expensive ones. It’s time together. Shared meals. Being outside. Playing games. Making memories that don’t require a receipt.

As parents, it’s easy to get caught up in giving our kids everything they ask for. It’s harder, and more important, to help them see that Christmas is about more than what shows up under the tree. It’s about how it feels to be together. The memories you collect along the way.

Because years from now, I don’t think my kids will remember how many gifts they opened. But I’m sure they remember the time with family and friends, the days spent together, and the feeling that the holidays are something you experience. That it’s the memories collected, not the Pokémon cards, that really last.

Family first. Neighbors first. Humanity first.
Rooted in Wisconsin. Growing forward in Texas.

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What a Holiday Bully Reminded Me About Kindness

On bullies, boundaries, and the quiet strength our families and communities need right now.

Friday nights in our house are pizza and a movie night. And since we’re officially in holiday season mode, this week’s movie was Christmas… Again?!  A Groundhog Day style Christmas story where the main character keeps reliving the holiday until she finally figures out the true meaning of Christmas. Nestled inside the repetitive plotline are several scenes where a neighborhood bully named Gretchen steals the donation jar from two younger kids. At first, the main character, Rowena, is too wrapped up in her own world to step in. But as she re-lives the day over and over, she starts thinking about others. Eventually she decides she’s going to stop the bully… and repeatedly gets tossed around by this big meanie herself.

Then she tries kindness. She hands Gretchen a Christmas present. Gretchen’s face softens. Her eyes brighten. For a split second you think, Ah, this is the moment. Kindness breaks through. The heart grows three sizes. 

And then?

Gretchen shoves her to the ground, grabs the gift and the donation money, and sprints off.

I actually laughed out loud. One of those surprised, “Okay, you got me” laughs. Not because bullying is funny, but because the moment captured something painfully realistic: sometimes kindness doesn’t melt a bully; sometimes the bully just… stays the bully. At least at first.

Rowena even tries to out bully the bully, learning Judo so she can overpower Gretchen, but that still does not work.

I then found myself explaining to the kids why being mean isn’t funny, and why I laughed anyway. My son asked if I ever had a bully when I was a kid. So we ended up having one of those unexpected parenting conversations about boundaries, courage, kindness, and what it really means to stand up for yourself and for others; and how to do that in the kind, right, human way.

It also connected back to last week’s Thanksgiving post, where I wondered whether some of the harshest public figures might soften around their own family tables, whether the versions of them we see on the news are often their worst and not their whole selves. I still want to believe that. People are more layered and more decent than the clips suggest. But believing that doesn’t mean giving anyone a free pass. 

The truth is, we have far too many leaders across politics, media, and business who seem comfortable behaving like bullies. People who punch down. People who stoke division instead of easing it. People who act like cruelty shows strength, when in reality it shrinks the world they lead.

And what troubles me most is this, kids see it. Kids copy it. Kids normalize it. If we don’t challenge bullying at the societal level, we silently teach the next generation to assume this is how power behaves: loud, aggressive, unkind, uninterested in understanding.

Fast forward to the day after pizza and a movie, and we’re standing outside the Texas Capitol, the workplace of some of those very same public figures whose rhetoric often sounds like Gretchen with a microphone. But we weren’t there for politics. We joined thousands of Austinites for the annual Christmas tree lighting and holiday sing-along. A tradition that started decades ago in the Capitol rotunda and has grown into a packed downtown celebration. Warm lights, warm voices, warm energy. It reminded me again that when you get real people together in a real place, shoulder to shoulder, we’re almost always better than the headlines suggest. Kinder. More patient. More human.

Capitol tree lighting and sing along - 2025

That’s what I tried to explain to my kids: kindness is important, but standing up to a bully doesn’t require becoming one. True strength, the kind I hope they carry forward, is a combination of compassion, understanding, empathy, courage, humility, and just the right amount of toughness.

And this is also why I’ve spent so much of this year volunteering with the Texas Forward Party. Of many things, I’m really proud of our Kindness campaign. A reminder that kindness isn’t just a nicety, it’s a strategy. A way to rebuild trust in a time that desperately needs it. A way to elevate leaders who don’t rely on fear or fury to get attention. A way to show that communities can move forward when we choose connection over combat.  And to add a little bit of Texas flair, I got to create a “Fixin’ to Fix It… with Kindness” t-shirt, because I genuinely believe we can fix the future by how we choose to show up now.

The holiday season has a way of nudging us toward our better selves. Maybe it’s the lights downtown, maybe it’s the familiar songs, or maybe it’s that people finally slow down long enough to actually see one another. When I look around in real life, I see far more kindness than cruelty, far more cooperation than division. That gives me hope.

The movie we watched may have been silly (one step from a Hallmark classic) but by the end, Rowena realizes she isn’t the only one dealing with change. Her family, her neighbors, even her bully, are all navigating something. She stops focusing on herself long enough to understand the people around her. And strangely enough, she wins the bully over not by force or by flattery, but by getting her to laugh by setting up a joke booth.

And maybe that’s the lesson the holidays always seem to give us… kindness and a bit of jolly (levity) are powerful things.

Family first. Neighbors first. Humanity first.
Rooted in Wisconsin. Growing forward in Texas.

The How Matters as Much as the What

Reflecting on Thanksgiving, communication, and cornbread stuffing

Being back in Wisconsin for Thanksgiving reminded me of something simple but meaningful: the food matters, sure, but the gathering, the intention behind it is what carries the real weight. The anticipation of getting together. Whether it was the long drive up through the cold, the cousins racing through my parents’ house, or the familiar sound of my mom orchestrating a dozen dishes at once, Thanksgiving has always been less about what’s served and more about how we show up to be together.

And that same idea kept resurfacing all week: in family conversations, in shared meals, and even in the small moments of chaos that come with kids and crowded kitchens. The how matters as much as the what. Wisconsin has a way of reminding me of that.

Growing up, my Thanksgiving favorite: stuffing. Bread cubes, butter, sage, onion; I’d even chow down Stovetop stuffing. So the first time I heard mention of cornbread stuffing when we moved South… It felt wrong, and I knew it wasn’t worth my time.

But then came a Thanksgiving volunteer shift at Whole Foods, in the prep kitchen where I spent hours cutting and drying pans of cornbread cubes. Everyone around me talking about how cornbread stuffing is their favorite.  It’s the best. With sausage. With jalapenos. With Bacon. I defended “real stuffing”, but my curiosity was piqued, and doing more listening then defending I decided I’d make cornbread stuffing that year.

And of course, I was hooked. Traditions evolve. Point goes to cornbread.

As for traditions, fifteen years ago, my family created a rather special tradition: Turkey Dice. It started with leftover Halloween Jell-O shots, and us asking “What if we turned this into a drinking game”, which spiraled into a full-fledged Thanksgiving dice game with an “Offical Rulebook” (misspelling courtesy of my cousin, Cassie). Back then, the adults played like their lives depended on avoiding the final Jell-O shot. But now the kids gather around the table, fighting for the “kid version Jello-O shots” and this year amended an additional tradition singing Hamilton’s “I’m not throwing away my shot!”.

Turkey Dice & Jell-O "shots" with the cousins - 2025

The what of the game changed. The how we come together, and that we always do it… hasn’t changed.

Thanksgiving get-togethers can be a house crammed full, conversations stopping and restarting, kids running in every direction, and something inevitably not going as planned. Joyful for some. Stressful for others. Conversations can be heartfelt, some can be a real snooze-fest, and others can be uncomfortable. I felt blessed this year, since other than the kids having their moments, the only friction I experienced was my niece (Estelle) telling me I looked like Dick Van Dyke’s “Chairman of the Bank” character in Mary Poppins, because he’s old (and I’m sporting a beard these days that has more white in it than any other color).

So on the long drive back to Texas, I found myself thinking about communicating with others, and drawn to a podcast on communication and conversations. Mel Robbins was interviewing Dr. Alison Wood Brooks, a Harvard professor who studies the science of communication. She talked about why conversations feel harder than they should, why we replay them in our heads afterward, and what really makes communication work.

The part that stuck with me most was her TALK model: Topics, Asking, Levity, Kindness.

Not complicated. Just a reminder of what makes conversations feel human.

Topics, when deliberate and thoughtful, set the tone. Thanksgiving starts with “How was the drive?” and ends with stories we couldn’t script if we tried. Good conversations move naturally from light to meaningful when we let them.

Asking, real asking, is about curiosity. Not rapid-fire questions, but the thoughtful follow-up that says, “I’m listening. Keep going.” It’s always a treat to be around someone who does this instinctively, the person who opens the whole room with one question after another.

Levity is the secret ingredient. Not jokes, necessarily, but just ease and lightness. The small laugh after a slip of the tongue that softens the moment.

Kindness is the backbone. The generosity and patience required to assume the best of someone sitting across from you, even when you disagree. Kindness changes the whole conversation, and can strengthen a connection.

Unfortunately, if you turn on the news lately, it can feel like the opposite of all that is going on. The loudest voices dominate. Tribalism wins the airtime. The clip of the day is almost always someone at their worst, never their best.

And I couldn’t help but wonder, when those same people sit at their own Thanksgiving tables, do they soften? Do they listen longer? Do they laugh more easily? Do they show kindness in ways the cameras never capture?

I want to believe they do. When in-person, with family, or with friends. Because what I saw this Thanksgiving is what I see again and again: when we’re gathered in person, around a table, a game, or a kitchen counter we’re softer. We’re better listeners. We laugh more. We give each other more room. And somehow, we find more common ground than we ever do online.

Maybe the world really is divided. But maybe the division shrinks when we choose to show up with Topics worth sharing, Asking in a manner that shows we care, Levity that keeps us human, and Kindness that holds it all together.

The what will always matter. But the how; how we talk, how we show up, how we treat one another is what moves us forward.

Family first. Neighbors first. Humanity first. 

Rooted in Wisconsin. Growing Forward in Texas.