Our new passion for hosting…
The warm joy of hosting–
As the mountains rained autumn leaves and acorns all around us, we welcomed friends and family from all over into the warmth of our little home. Hosting is a newer “hobby” we’ve both come to really to enjoy over the last few months. For most of our marriage, we’ve been the “guest” in countless homes, as we traveled across the nation and around the world for our job. It feels good to finally return the favor of hospitality to loved ones from near and far.
At the start of the month, Adam and Kathryn from Adventures of A+K stepped through our front door, and we enjoyed some really special moments together. Fried oreos and cheeseburgers were delighted under the night sky as Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone played at the local drive-in movie theater. Card and board games were played over the pumpkin-patterned tablecloth in the dining room, and high fives were slapped across the table after every win. The kitchen swirled scents of homemade chicken pot pie, tacos al pastor, and cinnamon apple muffins throughout their entire stay.
Having close friends under our roof is one of our favorite feelings, and there’s something so comforting about being able to share memories with people we hold dear in a space we hold dear. It feels like every day is Christmas morning, and life is just easy and effortless.
Turning host anxiety into host excitement–
The joy of hosting isn’t something I’ve always had, and to be honest, it wasn’t long ago when I actually struggled greatly with host anxiety. During one of my therapy sessions in the past, my therapist explained how our bodies react to excitement and anxiety in the exact same way. (Perhaps through sweating, an inability to fall asleep, or a loss of appetite.) Except with anxiety, the mind flickers through negative outcomes, while with excitement, the mind hones in on more positive results. Once I learned this, something clicked for me. Whenever I started to envision negative scenarios or craft up pessimistic thoughts, I tried my best to switch my thinking to all the good things that could come from hosting. The more I practiced positive thinking, the more joy I found in having people over. I suppose you could say that I’ve started to romanticize the act of hosting.
These days, I see such magic in hosting. From choosing out which chocolates and flowers to put in the guest bedroom, to preparing the extensive menu for the “Welcome Feast,” it gives me yet another creative outlet that others get to enjoy as well. I can happily say that it is the currently hobby I give most of my time to, and I can’t wait for MORE friends to visit us as we ring in the new year. (See you soon, Jen and Elliot, Nate and Alicia, and Adam and Kathryn…again!)
Because we apparently just can’t get enough of it, we’ve started to host local friends at our house so that more memories could be made on a regular basis. Two weeks back, we invited four couples (and their sweet kiddos) into our home for a women’s craft night and a men’s “bond-fire” gathering. We met these fine people back in August when we decided to join a local community group, and we’ve been meeting up with them all every single week for the last four months. I showed the ladies how to make DIY gnome ornaments for the holidays, while Chad started a roaring fire in our pit with the guys. We ordered in pizza and had an extensive charcuterie spread, and when everyone left as the cuckoo clock struck midnight, we were both bubbling over with joy. It feels almost too good to be true that we’ve found such a loving in-person community, who we can hang out with on a weekly basis. In this day and age, when everyone’s so busy and so tired, it’s incredibly refreshing and heart-warming to find people who are willing to give their time and energy to friendship.
A harvest season Friendsgiving–
As of right now, we are hosting our good friends, Nathaniel and Anirudh, from Southern California! We knew we wanted to celebrate Thanksgiving with some friends this year, and they were kind enough to make the long journey across the nation to make that idea possible.
We met them online back in 2020, when Nathaniel kindly offered us a water refill voucher, and in 2021, we got to meet him and his partner when they welcomed us to stay at their previous home in Portland, Oregon. (We were living in our tiny van on our U.S.A. road trip at that time!) Since then, they’ve come to visit us when we lived in Chattanooga, Tennessee, and now, they’re here with us in our new home in the Blue Ridge Mountains.
Having the ability to connect with people we’d otherwise never meet, is truly one of the best parts of technology. Nathaniel and Anirudh is now one of our closest friends, and if they hadn’t reach out to us through Instagram in 2020, we would have missed out on this brilliant friendship!
For Thanksgiving this year, I got creative with a Harvest Season themed feast, complete with festive mock-tails and a menu revolving around late autumn ingredients. My sister and her boyfriend came up to join the four of us for the day, and she brought her dogs! So, Gretel and Geppetto had the chance to play with their “cousins” as well as another friend’s dog who joined us for Thanksgiving.
Christmas came to the Storybook Cottage early this year!
Because we’ll be traveling for most of December, we decided to bring Christmas to our home early this year. We set up our tree and whipped out the holiday decorations in mid-November, and those small additions really made our home feel like a cozy fairytale cottage. We’ve been watching old time holiday movies, like the 1946 black and white version of It’s a Wonderful Life, and playing Christmas jazz while we work late into the night. This time of year hasn’t always felt easy, especially for me, but this year, it feels incredibly sweet and safe. We’ll be back home just before Christmas Day, so I can’t wait to curl up with Gretel and Geppetto on Christmas Eve and take them for a happy morning walk on a Christmas Day!
New travel videos on YouTube–
Our Wiesbaden and Rüdesheim vlog: We experienced some of West Germany’s best countryside towns at the start of autumn. Here is the link to the video.
Our Middle Rhine Valley vlog: We explored castles, rode a toboggan, and sipped on fine wine along Germany’s storybook river. Here is the link to the video.
So, where are we heading next?
Next Sunday, we are flying back to Taiwan for the THIRD time this year, but different from the last two trips, we’ll be meeting up with twelve “strangers” from all over North America. (Who we hope won’t be strangers by the end of the trip!) This is our very first group trip, and we are beyond honored to be showing twelve other adventurers around Taiwan. It’s going to be the perfect way to end the year!
We have received numerous emails and messages asking about our next group trip, and we haven’t made any decisions on it yet! If it were to happen, it would take place in the second half of 2025, since we already have travel plans for the first half of next year. Let’s see if we can make this an annual thing!
As we wrap up the year, we want to say a really big thank you to YOU for supporting us and for being a part of our newsletter community. Writing the newsletter is one of my favorite parts of our job, because it allows me to share thoughts on deeper topics and our lives beyond our travel adventures. We received SO many responses this last year on how the topics I wrote about were greatly relatable, and it’s wonderful to be able to connect with you all in our walk of life as well.
I look forward to sharing MORE thoughts with you in 2025! We wish you the happiest of holidays, and we’ll talk to you next year! ;)
MOST SINCERELY,
Claire (and Chad)
