Happy holidays, friends. If you get to play golf and be served five course meals and sit with your feet propped on a massage table, good for you. Holidays rock that way.

I built myself a small sukkah, this year as all years, a shrine to sweet childhood memories and an effort to pass those experiences on to my child. It’s beautiful, in a charming and cozy way. It’s a lot of work to set up and take down, but well worth the effort. Those who see me dragging the wooden panels across the yard call me a feminist, which makes my head swell way too big for the kosher part of the Sukkah. Building the sukkah is a tradition I couldn’t give up. I get a number of colored lights to blink away at night while we huddle with sweaters and our noses run.

Sukkos – the holiday of creativity and artistic expression on the panel walls – makes me reflect on my own artistic project; cartooning. I’ve made some progress with the craft of doodling itself, I think. I’m pretty okay at Photoshop now and I mostly only draw there. I’ve figured out how to use its great layering and pen tools too. I can still only do very basic drawings. Intricate settings stump me. I audited an art class in college, hoping to pick up some tips, but I just watched the most bizarre uses of paints instead. I myself never touched a canvas. One art student explained to me that her elaborate mysterious mush-mash of stuff and paint was a profound interpretation of an awesome dream she had with like, insight. Very nice, I said.

I’ll stick to this doodling thing, at home. And I’ll try not to do it asleep, dream awesomeness notwithstanding.