Old Ladies with Hats & New Year's Distractions

And also why unschooling is BS-proof, there is no "marriageocracy" and Zelda Youtuber is a legit job description.

Hello friends,

and happy Friday!

I don’t know about you but every day feels like a mixture of Monday and Wednesday and Friday (or what these days used to feel like back when I had a full-time office job!). Which is both a good thing - every day is its own day and I’m not dependent on the 5-day work week; and a not-so good thing - every day is its own day and at times they all start to look very similar.

If you are new here in my paid membership, I want to welcome you and thank you for supporting me and my writing.

This is a long-term project for me. I hope to keep bringing in more and more of what I’m studying, and eventually bring in my personal research on consent-based education, child rights and self-direction, as well as sharing my own very personal experience of living a life unschooled.

Your contribution helps me do all of that, and all of your kind words and shares help me feel that my work is valued.

My Friday emails are paywalled, so if you wish to carry on reading past the next paragraph, please consider becoming a paid member. It is 5USD a month and you get a bunch of perks.

Paid members: You can listen to me reading this post out loud (and embellishing it as I go!) here.

Last weekend we celebrated La Befana. It’s technically supposed to happen on January 6th, but I, ahem, had to move it to the 7th because La Befana aka Me was utterly unprepared.

If you don’t know about La Befana, she is an old, not particularly well put-together woman (tradition says she has broken shoes and a big old hat and is generally disheveled and witchy), who arrives in children’s homes during night between the 5th and 6th of January, and leaves treats in their socks.

Not stockings, actual socks.