In the fine print

2024 year in review: As featured in the New Yorker and the New York Times.

Year-in-review Christmas newsletters are becoming a lost art. For years, the first thing I’d do when I went home to my parents’ for Christmas would be to read through all the Christmas cards they’d collect in a small basket by the fireplace, and catch up on the lives of families I barely remembered interacting with in person—old neighbors, distant relatives—but who I felt I’d gotten to know quite intimately after 10-plus annual updates.

Social media has ruined all of that, of course. We get the updates all year long from anyone we may want to keep up with and way more than that.

I once wrote an “if we were honest” Christmas year in review letter about my first year post-divorce for a writing group prompt and people who read it still bring it up regularly, so I thought I’d bring the year-in-review letter back this year.

There was this one family we knew who used their annual letters to detail each family member’s health problems throughout the year, and in the spirit of those letters I will share that Pete and I rang in 2024 with fevers that turned out to be COVID.

It didn’t take much to go up from there.

We celebrated our 10-year wedding anniversary this year! We marked the occasion with a dinner at Agni of more than 10 courses. Going above and beyond feels hopeful about the future, right?

We are also heading into the 6-year anniversary of working remotely from home together, an unplanned development that began on March 11, 2020, and, like COVID, just never went away.

That means we are our own coworkers. That means we’ve spent 24-7, nearly 365 days a year, in close proximity. That means we must really like each other, because we are still together after a full 1,753 days of full exposure to each other’s annoying personality quirks.

Pre-COVID, I used to measure our time together by my sobriety. We drank together for four years before I stopped, and when I’d been sober for eight years I remember being in awe that we had not drank together for twice as long as we had drank together. But now, I measure it by number of frozen lunches eaten together, number of pots of coffee consumed together, number of times he prefaces moving down to the basement, where I make him work most of the time, as “guess it’s time to go down to my lair,” and number of times he comes up from said lair to share a breaking news item I already saw on my feeds hours before.

Despite working next to him for all this time and his tendency to take calls on speaker, I still don’t understand what his job entails in the slightest.

This year, Pete’s been spending his free time practicing riffs on his electric guitar and occasionally meeting up with his buddies for a round of disc golf.

For his birthday cake, I bought half a chocolate cake at Kroger and served it on its side so it kind of looked like a wagon wheel and not at all like half of a cake.

S turned 16 earlier this month! She has successfully completed one parking lot driving lesson with her dad.

She’s a sophomore this year, which means she’s taking geometry. I’ve personally been dreading this year for quite some time in anticipation of having to help her with geometry homework. Geometry, for me, was the worst year in my worst subject at school, and I still have visceral memories of having to stay after for tutoring in compasses and protractors, cosines and tangents.

I find it fascinating how every phase she goes through brings me back to that specific phase in my own life, something I wrote about for Scary Mommy in November.

This year she’s gotten way into stand-up comedy. She watches old comedy TV specials, stays up late to watch SNL, and enrolled in a joke writing class. She spends her free time building Lego sets, playing video games and swinging on swing sets as frequently as possible.

She’s also still firmly entrenched on Twitter, despite the Elon of it all. Even though I am under strict orders NOT to follow her on there, I couldn’t be more proud of how each and every one of the 19.7K tweets she’s sent since we allowed her to start an account when she turned 13 has demonstrated perfect spelling and grammar.

For her birthday cake, I carved a likeness of Dr. Katz, Professional Therapist, out of fondant and colored him in with edible ink markers.

J is eight now and in third grade. She’s in that funny pre-tween window where she both desperately wants to be older and desperately wants to stay in childhood. She is constantly balancing that tightrope between kid and teen. Like, this Christmas, the early versions of her wish list were filled with makeup and skincare and perfume and clothes, and then when we opened presents with my family a few weeks before Christmas she looked on with envy at her younger-by-six-months cousin’s toy haul and immediately started on a new Christmas list with dolls and unicorns and remote control cars.

This year she’s taking dance classes and gymnastics and begging to sign up for cheerleading too. Her favorite pastime is putting on one-woman America’s Got Talent-style talent shows where we watch her compete against herself with choreographed dance routines, heartfelt karaoke renditions and improvised rap battles and declare a winner.

For her birthday cake, she sketched out exactly what she wanted, the phrase “8 in the house!” in a font called “Groovy” that she spotted on Pinterest surrounded by hearts and flowers, which I recreated in white royal icing on a pink iced layer cake.

(I have had better cake years.)

As for me, as part of my ongoing efforts to avoid paralyzing anxiety caused by staying informed on what’s going on in the world, I developed the most basic hyperfixation ever, the life and music of Taylor Swift.

This all started toward the end of last year, when I mainlined her albums in preparation for the Eras Tour movie, which I wrote about here. I saw the movie with June and then went back by myself to catch a screening for which I had the entire theater to myself, which ranked among my top 10 moments of last year.

Then Taylor released a new album this April and the amount of time I spent listening to her music started to become embarrassing. In an effort to legitimize the number of hours I passed thinking about this woman and to convince myself that this was more than just parasocialism, I hatched an idea to develop a writing class themed around Taylor Swift’s songwriting. This, of course, necessitated many more hours of poring over her lyrics and storytelling (in song and in life), trying to identify the magic elements that make her songs so meaningful to so many.

And in some twist of luck, my course offering was spotted by a writer who pitched his editor on the idea of signing up for the class and writing about it for the New Yorker.

For me, this culminated in two very exciting Sundays-into-Mondays. The first was when I spent an hour-and-a-half being interviewed over brunch like I was an actual celebrity (none of what we talked about made it into the actual story, but still!), and the next day I got to teach the class, which was exhilarating and made me feel alive and had me convinced I’d missed my calling as a teacher. The next was watching the final Eras Tour show via livestream, even though it didn’t START until 10:50 p.m. Eastern, which is usually past my bedtime these days, and then waking up to read the New Yorker article about my class on Monday morning.

For those keeping tabs, that means 2024 was the year I was featured in the New York Times and the New Yorker. Pretty pretty cool. And! Now I get to brag that I have gone through the New Yorker’s surreal fact-checking process.

In my free time, I started collecting all the old teen magazine titles I subscribed to as a girl and reading back through them to catalog the incredible examples of body shaming messaging that can be found in their pages.

I wrote about my new project, A Girl’s Guide to Hating Her Body, on the NAAFA blog earlier this month.

I have a sneaking feeling this newfound fixation on all things girlhood has something to do with the fact that I will be 44 next year—and this horrifying article about how our bodies age in spurts at the ages of 44 and 60 that never strays far from my mind.

I did not make myself a birthday cake. But I did blow out a candle on a slice of Mile High chocolate cake at Cap City Fine Diner.

And there’s nobody I’d rather be staring down the barrel of a year like 2025—and a rapidly aging 44th trip around the sun—with than these people.

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year from the Mann-Hites!