As the year winds down, I love reading all the recaps. Yes, this year sucked for lots of reasons, but there were some bright spots. I wanted to share some of mine this year (I’m giving you a top five, but not in order.)

Books – Fiction
 
1. The Nightingale by Kristen Hannah
2. Behold the Dreamers by Imbolo Mbue
3. A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
4. Americanah by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
5. Another Brooklyn by Jacqueline Woodson
Books – Non Fiction
 
1. Who Thought This Was a Good Idea? by Alyssa Mastromonaco
2. A Hope More Powerful Than the Sea by Melissa Fleming
3. Scrappy Little Nobody by Anna Kendrick
4. Why Not Me? by Mindy Kaling
5. Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates
TV Shows/Movies
 
1. Game of Thrones – the most recent season. Every Sunday night this summer, we turned off all the lights in our apartment and light our Winterfell candle. I had to remind myself to breath… so many times.
2. Star Wars: The Last Jedi – I loved it. I don’t get why so many “fans” hated it, but I thought it was awesome.
3. Beauty and the Beast – This was my favorite Disney movie when I was younger because I wanted a giant room of books. I really liked this movie.
4. Shameless – We jumped on board with this show late last year and watched the entire series in early 2017. I love every character for different reasons, but it’s great.
5. SNL – I’m 100% back on board with the last few seasons of SNL. I think the most recent presidential election gave them so much material and I need that laugh every week. We use Hulu to watch it every Sunday morning.
Honorable mention – TGIF shows on Hulu. We have been watching episodes of Family Matters for the last few months and I’m not mad about it. I love that they have brought all these shows back.
Self Love Items
1. Countermatch Collection from Beautycounter (plus they have 30% off tons of stuff this week if you use the promo code WINTERSALE). Now that winter weather has arrived, my skin is dry and I absolutely love this stuff.
2. Good veg friendly cookbooks. I’m diving into this one first thing in the new year. We’ve almost finished cooking our way through this easy and beautiful book. I also just purchased this one because I love the Instagram account she runs and I needed to try some of her creations myself.
3. A good blender for smoothies and soup and anything else you would use a blender for. We picked out this Ninja blender after lots of research and we use it almost every day.
4. Hygge. You can read my full post here, but we have been working to be really aware of this word and making sure it’s part of our every day life. The concept is wonderful (especially in the winter.)
5. The EWG app. I’ve been continuing my journey of getting rid of bad chemicals in our daily routines and it takes time because I want to do my research on products, but this app makes decision making at the store a lot easier. If you haven’t downloaded it yet, you should.SongsSpotify put this together for me and I’m so thankful, because I’ve been listening to this playlist for the last week and still loving almost all of these songs.
That’s a pretty long round up, so I’m stopping here. I’ll share a more personal recap this week to round out this year before we head off to the mountains. Hope you are reading this from your couch in your pajamas. When this goes live, I’ll be in my office eating leftovers.