holiday issue Archives

Editor’s Note: Holding Space for Joy & Sorrow

Published October 29, 2025

By Cassandra Lane

This year, for the first time since I started working for L.A. Parent in 2017, a health issue forced me to take a considerable amount of time off. While my friends traveled, I spent summer recovering and reflecting — on local and global crises, work, health and on the 18 years I’ve spent being Sol’s mom.

From my bed, I snapped photos of him after he kissed me goodbye on his way to his camp counselor job. The summer that marked his bridge between high school and college.

Two weeks before campus drop-off, my phone rang with urgent news: My father had passed.

I have not had a real relationship with my father since I was 5 or 6, when he and my mother divorced. The last time I’d seen him in person was at least 25 years ago. For years, most of our exchanges came through Facebook.

The last one was dated June 26, a day after my surgery. He sent a plush animal waving emoji, followed by “Are you OK?” He’d obviously caught sight of a post I’d made about my surgery. I DM’ed him back on June 27: “Hey Dad, I had hip replacement surgery Wednesday.”

I never heard back from him, and I thought: “Figures.” I pushed my inner little girl back down to where I’d long ago buried her and went back to the business of caring for myself.

A month later, my father was gone for good. And though I had not seen him in all those years, a part of me felt gutted, cheated. I read beautiful posts that my brother Kenny (his son from his second marriage) crafted about our father. A cousin wrote, “He was my favorite uncle.”

At his funeral, Kenny’s daughter, my 5-year-old niece Chika, sat on my lap. “Is Pa in there?” she asked, sadly eyeing the closed gray casket. We sat on the front pew, just a few feet away from a large portrait of my father, his face widened in a grin. I could almost reach out and touch this face I both know and do not know.

But those who knew him well filled in some of the gaps. One of his former high school classmates reminisced about their decades-long relationship and his brother Leo, the reverend who gave the benediction, recounted hilarious stories that had the whole church in stitches. Dad had one of the biggest laughs I’ve ever heard. This guffawing congregation would have been right up his alley.

At the cemetery, my son helped the pallbearers heft my father’s casket out of the hearse and onto a platform under the tent. The two never met, but Sol said he was honored to serve his grandfather in this way. I felt my heart fill with a longing deeper than any grave. Since the funeral, I have looked often at one of my father’s DMs: “I love you, my smart daughter. No matter what.”

I hope our holiday issue will be a balm and source of inspiration for you, as it has been for me. We explore ways to gift your loved ones with meaningful experiences, ways to give back to our larger community and how to navigate the roiling waves of joy and grief.

May our season be filled with love — no matter what.

A Holiday Wish

Published October 31, 2023

By Cassandra Lane

So far, the 2020s have been no cakewalk. Or, as one of my favorite podcasters (who’s usually a bouncing ball of optimism) said: “The world’s a freakin’ dumpster fire floating down the river.”

She was discussing the Israel-Hamas war, which has claimed thousands of lives on both sides — fresh atrocities on top of ongoing ones in the Ukraine and other parts of the world. I saw a professor of history tweet that she was finding it increasingly difficult to “just carry on as if it’s another day.”

Yet time marches on, and here we are, approaching another holiday season. How do we celebrate when dread invades the place where anticipation used to reside?

By late October, I had nary a plan set for the holidays and harbored a sneaky suspicion that it might stay that way. Months earlier, my youngest sister, who recently built a beautiful farmhouse in the middle of a bunch of acres in the middle of nowhere in rural Maryland, begged the family to come visit for Thanksgiving. But another sibling and I, who disagree profoundly on some
political and ideological issues, had a spat, and that drained my enthusiasm over getting together.

We love to wax with perplexity over war. “I just don’t understand it,” we say. But conflict starts in each individual person. Inside that word — individual — hides another: divide. And within the coldness of division, we can fall prey to cutting “the other” off, shutting them out. I have done it. You have done it.

Consider that family member you don’t like. Or neighbor. Or at colleague. What was the conflict that broke the camel’s back? In my case, I can tell when I feel thoroughly justified in my stance. A wall goes up. A door closes. A line in the sand is drawn.

For this issue, I asked poet Lisbeth Coiman to write a different kind of holiday story than what we usually explore. I asked her to write about how tough this holiday season can be for some, whether dealing with a nasty divorce, difficult in-laws (and there’s always multiple sides to a story), financial struggles or unmet expectations. I assigned the story before this most recent war, yet it inspires self-reflection that can be applied to a variety of conflicts.

When war is raging in another part of the world, it’s easy to stay absorbed in our “safe” corners and assume such unthinkable horror will never touch us. That history will never repeat itself. The history professor knows better.

Believing we can save the world is the stuff of childhood dreams. But perhaps this is a holiday season where we can take at least a step in opening a closed door — even if that door is inside our minds and hearts. And I do hope it’s a season where weapons are laid down and peace talks step up — across dinner tables and borders.

You know who doesn’t care about our feuds? Our children, the unborn and those who are already gone.

Cassandra Lane is Editor-in-Chief of L.A. Parent.

Getting In the Spirit Takes Planning

Published November 2, 2022

By Cassandra Lane

Cassandra, holding the gift of “Sarah Vaughan’s Golden Hits” last Christmas. PHOTO BY MARCUS RICH

As soon as September rolls around, my son starts waxing on about the winter holidays, dropping hints about his burgeoning Christmas list and licking his lips with the anticipation of his favorite Thanksgiving food: candied yams.

“Sol,” I playfully scolded him this year, “it’s still summer in my book. It’s hot outside, school just started, and I’m still adjusting to that. I am not ready to start talking about wish lists and candied yams.”

He laughed, agreeing to leave me alone for a while, to warm up to the idea that summer would soon be over, no matter the L.A. weather. We were in the kitchen, so I opened the spice cabinet to take a quick inventory of what I already had on hand.

Nutmeg, allspice, vanilla extract, cinnamon? Check.

Secret family ingredient that our kinfolk swear sets our sweet potato pies and candied yams apart? Missing.

I made a mental note to stock up early since I’ve experienced too often the horror of waiting until the last minute and finding empty spice shelves. I silently thanked my son for his early cravings.

Besides, just a couple of days later, after we published the September/October issue of L.A. Parent, I hopped on a Zoom call with the other members of our editorial team to plan out our holiday issue. Working for a magazine means working a few months into the future. And so, despite my tendency to want to hang onto summer, it was time to get into the holiday spirit. As we strategized the ideas that grew into the stories you see here — Mike Sonksen’s Main Street-inspired shopping adventure, Chelsee Lowe’s roundup of some of our local chefs’ favorite holiday foods, Gregg Keer’s walk down holiday memory lane with local musicians, Nina Harada’s calendar of the best ballets, parades and light shows — I felt the first twinge of holiday giddiness.

Through sound and image, taste and scent, these stories are lovely reminders that leaning into our senses can help soften our inner Scrooges, reawakening our connection to whatever holidays we celebrate. My husband started lighting his own festive spark in early October by bringing home pumpkin-scented candles, lush plants, cinnamon-spiked pinecones and the thickest plaid blanket I’ve ever seen.

To light my own fire, I slipped onto my record player a gift he gave me last Christmas: “Sarah Vaughan’s Golden Hits.” The jazz great’s rendition of “Misty,” especially, gets me in the spirit. While it’s not a holiday song, for me, the beautiful and complicated feelings that the holidays can conjure up reside in Vaughan’s wistful sound — nostalgic memories of yesteryear, wishes that were never granted, losses we thought would do us in — all swirling together without judgment.

Whether this is your favorite time of the year — or you can’t wait until all the hoopla is over — I wish for you deep, end-of-the-year exhales. I wish for you, my fellow parents, a moment to pause and bask in unbroken peace.

Cassandra Lane is Editor-in-Chief of L.A. Parent.