Happy New Year!
Resolutions for 2026 and new horizons
Happy New Year!!
2025 was impossibly brief and impossibly long at the same time. I felt our lives here in D.C. grow in palpable and exciting ways over the past year. That growth was challenging, but also convicting — we are in the right place!
This past year was also very busy, and I certainly felt burnout creep in multiple times. 2025 showed me the aspects of my life where there is a gap between where I am and where I need be in order to keep things in balance as our life continues to pick up. This year gave me an opportunity to grow, and I think I made the most of it.
And while nothing necessarily changes with a new calendar, I’ve always loved the fresh start of new or auspicious beginnings. It’s a good time to look ahead, dream about new possibilities, and try to imagine what I might say about 2026 at this time next year.
New Year’s Resolutions 🥂
Spend 1000 hours outside. I love being outdoors, but the lack of a porch or yard has meant that I spend far less time outdoors than I’d like. And, with the return of winter’s early sunsets, I’ve felt a bit cooped up recently. The inspiration for this resolution struck sometime last week, and I’m really excited for the challenge of getting outside as much as possible next year and recording progress toward the goal!
1000 hours in 365 days comes down to an average (average! this is key!) of 2.75 hours per day or 19 hours per week. I can’t wait!
Read 50 books. More specifically…
Read John Milton’s Paradise Lost. I’m very excited about this, especially because I haven’t picked the poem up since my sophomore year of college. We started studying Paradise Lost right before the spring break that turned into two weeks at home that turned into full-blown quarantine. I admittedly wasn’t great at close-reading the (dense! long!) text for online classes during those first weeks of the pandemic, so most everything after Book 4 is a bit hazy. I’m looking forward to working through the text with this year-long book club and revisiting the greatest poem in the English language!
Read eight additional books written before 1900. This delineation is arbitrary, but the point is to read a handful of classics throughout the year. I generally read for relaxation, so I want to be intentional about picking a few Great Books™️ to sprinkle in between the easier reads I’ve gravitated toward in recent years.
Write consistently. I missed writing this year, and I’m excited to build more time into my weeks for all sorts of writing, from this 'stack to political commentary and beyond.
On that last note… I’m looking forward to setting aside some dedicated time each month to write here, for The Home Front!
I created The Home Front two years ago in my parents’ living room over Christmas. At the time, I was new to D.C., anticipating that a proposal could be just around the corner, and working full-time (and more or less from home) as a ghostwriter focused on domestic policy issues. On the side, I was writing freelance for a handful of publications, including weekly articles at The American Spectator.
Day in and day out, I was reading and writing about the culture war — the destruction of the American way of life, of the family, of the human person — and I was eager for a side project that gave me freedom to explore something lighter, happier, and more fun.
Now, two years later, I’m on my third year of living and working in the nation’s capital, I got married last fall, and I’m nearly a year into a job that has put me squarely in the center of culture war politics. Instead of just researching and writing about the issues I’m passionate about, I am actively engaged in the politics, strategy, and lobbying at the heart of those issues. I’m not sitting in the bleachers — I’m on the team!
All told, it’s been an incredibly gratifying evolution. One of the trade-offs, though, has been less energy and less time to dedicate to writing. After the initial transition period into this new season, I started to feel the itch to write return. I’ve been gathering inspiration throughout this year, giving creativity space to blossom a bit more in my day-to-day life, and thinking about what The Home Front should look like in the coming year.
In short, it’ll be exactly the same and better than ever, to quote one of my brother’s most memorable quips.
I want to keep leaning into the things that first made me excited to write here — good books and good food! — and explore some of the other things that animate my life, too. I want to think more about growing up and doing “grown-up” things like getting married and running a household, or hosting a friend’s baby shower, or celebrating holidays on your own for the first time.
I want to write about these things not for a high-minded philosophical reason, not because the online Right has fetishized a one-dimensional female domesticity, but because everyday things are worth doing well, and my generation has been left largely without a script for their mastery.
So, in the coming year, expect plenty of book reviews, plenty of recipes (in a slightly new format!), and reflections on what I’m learning along the way!
Cheers to a new year! 🥂