Sunday ☕ : Winter’s Warm Deception

Winter’s Warm Deception

The morning sun pours through my window like honey, thick and golden, painting dancing geometric patterns across the white walls as oak trees sway outside. While friends up north are scraping frost from windshields with credit cards they forgot to bring inside, listening to that satisfying crunch of fresh snow underfoot, Austin is unseasonably warm.

Outside, a mockingbird runs through his repertoire, sampling songs like Spotify, while somewhere an early riser with a lawnmower hums a suburban Sunday song. No woodsmoke from chimneys here, no radiators clanking to life with their winter symphony. Just the quiet whir of ceiling fans and the distant prospect of a perfect warm winter day.

Days Until Christmas

Seven sunrises from now, Christmas week begins. Most of my friends have already shifted into holiday mode — out-of-office messages drafted, Amazon deliveries stacked like Tetris blocks by front doors, that last push of work emails before the blessed silence of the break.

I tell myself the same lie every year: This time I’ll tackle the garage. This time I’ll sort through those boxes that haven’t been opened since the last move, the ones with handwriting so faded I can’t remember which house they came from. This time I’ll create neat labeled bins:

“Tax Records 2018,” “Kids’ Art Projects,” “Cables That Probably Don’t Work But Might Be Important.” And if I’m really disciplined, I’ll take a few loads to Goodwill and a few to the dump. I know I don’t need most of it anymore, yet I cling to it like a hoarder with the mistaken belief that I’ll need it someday.

But we both know what happens. The absence of meetings becomes permission for long mornings with coffee and doomscrolling. The empty inbox becomes an invitation to pick up brushes instead of boxes. The garage, with its archaeological layers of family history, remains untouched — a monument to good intentions and better alternatives.

Boxes Tell Stories

This year, though, the garage confronts me daily. Twenty years of accumulation mixed with the contents of two college apartments. Easels lean against old motorcycle parts and rusty tools, camping gear from trips that feel like yesterday but were a decade ago. One son’s skateboard collection, boxes of stuffed toys, old bikes and scooters, and a ping pong table that never gets used ... all abandoned things that were once so important we had to buy them.

Come January, one will load what fits into a U-Haul and drive five hours to his first real job, the kind with benefits and a 401(k) and stock options, the kind that makes you suddenly feel both proud and ancient. His brother's stuff waits too, his apartment too small for the boxes of stuff he has not yet admitted he no longer needs.

Pins and Needles

The holidays arrive draped in twinkling lights and wrapped in expectation, but they carry weight too. For me, they trigger a specific vigilance — that careful watching, that unconscious bracing for the moment when cheer might shatter like Christmas bulbs falling off the tree.

Will everyone behave this year? Or will someone mention politics over the glazed ham? Will old grievances resurface between the second and third glass of wine? Will that family member who can transform any gathering into a courtroom arrive ready to prosecute crimes real and imagined?

I am, as I’ve been told more than once, an avoider of conflict. Guilty as charged. But when you’ve watched your mother cry into dish towels, day after day, month after month — when you’ve seen your father shrink into his recliner, choosing silence over futile defense — you learn that some battles aren’t worth fighting. You learn to chart courses around icebergs, to read the room like weather radar, to have backup plans for your backup plans.

Christmas Amnesia

Every year, hope triumphs over history. The invitations go out to everyone because “it’s family” and “it’s Christmas” and “maybe this year will be different.” We set the table with good china and our best intentions, creating place settings for people who might detonate like hidden mines.

My parents learned, finally, to set boundaries — rules of engagement for holiday gatherings. If voices rise above a certain decibel level, if cruelty masquerades as honesty, if the gathering becomes a stage for old productions of family drama, then someone has to leave. The rule still exists, though using it feels like admitting defeat.

I watch other families with something approaching wonder … the ones who laugh without edge, who tease without drawing blood, who can sit in the same room without everyone mentally mapping the exits. I know they have their own hidden struggles, but from outside, their ease looks like magic, like something from those Hallmark Christmas movies where the biggest crisis is burned cookies.

The Empty Chairs

But here’s what haunts me more than family friction: the people spending Christmas with no one to buy gifts for, no table to join, no chaos to navigate or avoid. When I was young, my grandmother collected what she called “strays” — though she meant it with deep affection. Our Christmas table stretched longer each year, mismatched chairs pulled from bedrooms and the basement.
There was her old friend whose children lived states away. She brought mashed potatoes every year and taught me the secret to great potatoes was nutmeg. There was Raymond, my father’s war buddy — single his whole life, he played organ at church and retired from the Post Office. He showed up every holiday for 23 years until we lost him too. He always told the same jokes, and we never let on that we had heard them before. We loved him for the reliable absurdity of it.

My second grandmother wasn’t blood at all. She’d lost her entire family in a car accident — husband, three children, even the family dog — in 1948. Lost her home, across the street. Lost everything but the clothes in her closet. She went from neighbor to grandmother. She lived with us from before I was born until she died when I was 17. I never saw her without a Bible on her lap. She was simply Della to us, and no one ever questioned it.

The Radar We Need

As we slide into Christmas week, passing neighbors stringing lights in tank tops instead of parkas, I’m thinking about peripheral vision — not the literal kind, but the emotional radar we need to engage this time of year.

Who in your orbit might be spending December 25 with Netflix and Doordash takeout? Who’s putting on a brave face but dreading the silence of their empty apartment? Who lost someone this year and is facing that first brutal holiday with an empty chair?

Sometimes the greatest gift isn’t wrapped. It’s the text that says, “We set a place for you.” It’s the call that says, “I’m making too much food again — help me out?” It’s recognizing that chosen family can be just as real as blood, that sometimes the best gatherings are the ones where nobody matches but everyone belongs.

And here’s a trick my grandmother discovered. Family members don’t act out and blow up when there are guests at the table.

The Promise and Truth

I won’t pretend this season is pure joy. It’s complicated, layered like those boxes in the garage — beauty stacked on pain, hope tangled with history. But maybe that’s the honest miracle: that we keep trying. That we keep setting the table. That we keep opening our doors, even when we’re not sure what will walk through them.

My coffee’s gone cold as I write this, the sun now high enough that the shadow patterns have disappeared from the walls. Somewhere, someone is pulling out Christmas decorations, finding the ornament their child made in third grade, the one with the photo where they’re missing both front teeth. Somewhere else, someone is looking at their phone, waiting for it to ring, for an invitation that might not come.

This year, as I avoid my garage and navigate the complex choreography of family gatherings, I’m trying to keep my radar on. To notice the quiet ones at parties, the ones who leave early, the ones who show up with store-bought cookies, apologizing for not baking. They might be the ones who need someone to see them, to make room at a table, to become the new tradition that makes the season bearable.

Because every Christmas should feel like belonging somewhere, even if that somewhere isn’t perfect, even if the family is chosen rather than given, even if the garage never gets cleaned and the conflicts never fully resolve.

The magic isn’t in the perfect gathering — it’s in the gathering itself, in the stubborn insistence that nobody should eat Christmas dinner alone, that every table can stretch a little wider, that sometimes the best gift is simply saying: You’re welcome here, exactly as you are. That’s why we call it the Spirit of Christmas.

Even if you’re the one who starts the arguments. Even if you’re the one who cries into the mashed potatoes. Even if you’re the one who doesn’t know how to be around happy families because you never had one.

PS: Every year my church does services in four locations, and every year hundreds of new people show up for Christmas services. And even if it’s their one time per year, they are welcomed and loved. The gift possessed by those who raised me was rooted in the gift that Christ gave us, which is why we celebrate his gift. I encourage you to go somewhere, be with others, sing carols, and celebrate the true magic of the season.

PPS: Our Winter Art Escape has just 14 spots left. If you’re dreaming of painting Spanish moss instead of shoveling snow, of capturing warm light on historic architecture while others are trapped indoors, join us in Hilton Head and Savannah. Sometimes the best gift is permission to escape winter entirely. www.winterartescape.com

PPPS: Watercolor Live is coming January 21. For four days, while everyone else is making resolutions they’ll break by February, you could be mastering techniques that last a lifetime. www.watercolorlive.com

PPPPS: Speaking of belonging somewhere, our Plein Air Convention (this May in the Ozark Mountains) is where your people gather. The ones who understand why you stop the car to photograph how light hits a barn, why you have 17 tubes of nearly identical blue paint, why “I’ll be there in five minutes” means “after this cloud formation changes.” Early bird pricing ends soon — consider it my Christmas gift to your future artist self. www.pleinairconvention.com

PPPPPS: Our PaintTube.tv store with over 700 art instruction courses is having a big holiday sale. Good time to get some great discounts and tools to help you grow as an artist.

Who Is This Guy Eric Rhoads?

Eric Rhoads is the founder and publisher of PleinAir Magazine and Fine Art Connoisseur Magazine (both on newsstands nationally), author and host of six Art Marketing instruction videos, writes a blog on Art Marketing, and is the author of the Amazon bestseller Make More Money Selling Your Art. Additionally, he produces the weekly e-newsletters American Watercolor, Fine Art Today, Inside Art, PaintTube ArtNotes, Pastel Today, Plein Air Today, and Realism Today. Eric hosts the in-person Plein Air Convention & Expo, the Fine Art Trip for art collectors, and painting retreats including Paint Adirondacks, Fall Color Week, and the Winter Art Escape, as well as online virtual events Acrylic Live, Pastel Live, PleinAir Live, Realism Live, Watercolor Live Digital Painting Live, Gouache Live, and Art Business Mastery Day. He is also the producer of the PleinAir Salon Online Art Competition and art instructional courses through PaintTube.tv. Each weekday Eric hosts Art School Live, a YouTube show featuring free demos from a variety of artists, and he is host of the PleinAir Podcast and Art Marketing Minute Podcast. Eric is a plein air, landscape, and portrait painter with works at Castle Gallery. He is heavily involved in the radio industry as founder of Radio Ink Magazine as well as Radio + Television Business Report, the Radio Forecast Conference, and the Hispanic Radio Conference. He is the author of the bestselling book Blast from the Past: A Pictorial History of Radio’s First 75 Years. Eric lives in Austin, Texas, with his bride, Laurie, and they are the parents of triplets. Learn more at EricRhoads.com, or see Everything We Do.