The urgency of the holidays can be hard to shake. The distant echoes of winter finals, the pre-holiday crises that every worker faces, the daily ratcheting up of a distractible child’s excitement and meltdowns, the long shadow of losses, December deaths and familial estrangements, all have left me feeling hounded at some point. Yet I still crammed the last month of the year with too much to do, as if it wouldn’t be December without an anxious surge of adrenaline.

A few years ago, I came across the idea of doing less at the holidays rather than more, in a source I no longer remember. My inner skeptic rolled her eyes, but the seed of insight was planted. Memories surfaced randomly in the following days. As a child, my favorite Christmas was the year a heavy snowstorm kept all the company away. We skipped the scratchy dress-up clothes; for once there was enough time to play with our gifts. Decades later, at the end of a difficult year, our son Michael arrived on the Monday after Thanksgiving. He was 16 days old. There was no time or need for holiday trappings; that season’s joy remains unmatched. A few years afterwards, when the holiday budget was particularly lean, I bought a raffle ticket anyway from a nun going door to door in our neighborhood. She was raising money for Little Flower High School, my mother’s alma mater. I won second prize, enough cash to buy the train set Michael wanted. Once I realized that my favorite memories were bound by a sense of calm and well-being, feelings aligned with the season, the way forward was clear.

I began a tradition of doing at least one less thing each year. There are fewer decorations around our house now, indoors and out. I shop locally and skip the malls. My husband, Steve, creates a single photo greeting card appropriate for everyone. For the past three years, we’ve ordered a tray of bracciole from Carlino’s Market in Ardmore to serve for Christmas dinner. This year, a leak on the porch roof made our decision about what to eliminate easy. There is no wreath on the front of the house; it would have hung directly below where the roofers did their work. We still cut down a fresh tree at Varner Farms in Oaks, but it is two feet shorter. We skipped the white pine rope around the front door this year, too. We’re having a ladder-free Christmas.

What remains at the heart of the holidays for me is baking. When I was very young, I knelt on a kitchen chair next to my mother and pretended I was making snow while sifting flour into the batter. In my twenties, living on a student budget, everyone on my list was given chocolate cream cheese brownies baked from scratch. For a few years, I made schneckin following a co-worker’s family recipe. It was an all-day process, one I gave up after the year I took off Christmas Eve to make them. I got as far as putting the first batch in the oven when my father called and said I needed to come right away, my mother needed me. Fueled by imagined catastrophes, I never ran a faster mile; what actually happened did not occur to me. After washing the car, my mother’s wet shoe slipped off the brake. She rolled through the garage wall and came to a stop in the basement. The impact sent the contents of my father’s workbench flying. Thirty years’ of accumulated tools, nuts and bolts, and screws and nails covered the floor. By the time I got home, the schneckin batter was ruined. The next year, I had no time for complicated recipes.

My baking years peaked when Michael was a student and I worked from home. While doing a school project on family recipes, he decided that cookies were what we did best. I began to hold fall cookie trials to test new recipes; eventually we settled on nine kinds of cookies, baked in double batches. Each year on the last day of school before winter break, Michael brought tins of cookies to share in all his classes. He’s on his own now, so the list is down to seven varieties. My plan is to make mostly single batches, which is a good thing. I got a late start on this year’s baking after spending part of the morning dealing with a loose end for an old client. Doing less during the holidays doesn’t mean eliminating the unexpected. It just means there is room to respond without getting frazzled.

Now you’ll have to excuse me. It’s time to make the Cream Cheese Chocolate Chip cookies. (The secret ingredient is orange zest.)