I'm taking the day off today (and the whole last week of the year off, too), so I decided to do some catch-up on my records.

My retirement savings hit a new hundred-thousand mark, only 7 months after hitting the last hundred-thousand dollar benchmark.  At this rate, I'll have a million by the time I am 65.5, but I'm not counting on that.  I'm expecting we'll have another recession to dig out of that will slow things down, but I'm optimistic in the long term for Wall Street if not Main Street.  There are literally trillions of cash dollars that have been sitting on the side since the pandemic and with low interest rates, they are coming back more into the stock market as bond rates are not as attractive.  Main Street will take longer to recover, but the new administration gives me hope that they will help this part of the recovery.  This is one of Janet Yellin's focus areas so I'm glad she will be in charge of Treasury.  Less income inequality helps all!

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Today was supposed to be our holiday party at work, but with the COVID surge, we've canceled the regular holiday lunch.  Usually we have two holiday celebrations:  one in early December, when the company President is in town (he visits our office about 10x/year for about 3 days each time); that is always a dinner event at a relatively posh restaurant.  Then we have the in-house lunch for the local staff.  For the first 3 years I was with the company, that was accomplished by catering from a local grocery store (which I always found disappointing as a meal, but the point was the celebration, not the food); then last year, we started catering from local restaurants.  We had this year's catering scheduled too, until the recent surge.  This is the day when we do our two gift-exchanges:  we all draw one person's name from a hat and buy a gift of no more than $25 for that person, plus we do a "white elephant" exchange of gag gifts costing no more than $5.  I'll send my giftee her present as an Amazon gift card via email today, and if anything's been left for me, it will be on my desk the next time I go in.  So this part of the celebration is emotionally unsatisfying but physically safe, which I'd druther.

I seem to have missed out on Chanukkah altogether--really no point in lighting a menorah all by oneself--and all the less so when your dining room table has been transmogrified into your desk.  My congregation had a Zoom get-together for the final night last night, but I forgot and missed it.  As far as Christmas, since I'm Jewish, it's never a big day anyways.  My congregation will have a dinner get-together and Shabbat service on Friday evening.  As a single person, the holidays have always been more of a pain to get through than a celebration anyways, although I really do enjoy looking at my city during the holidays--we ARE the Christmas City, and downtown is always a very cheery place during the holiday.

I have been catching up with some friends over the holiday season via phone, and that is very nice.  Other than that, I've picked up my knitting again for the first time in a decade, and *my* big ritual this time of year is always doing an annual review and some goal planning for the new year.  That--and some decluttering, and some CFP review--are what I will work on during my week off at year end.