Alyson, Erin, and I forged a friendship during our years at Mills College when we were all in the Creative Writing program. My earliest memory of Alyson is Spring 2005—she was late to the first meeting of an evening writing workshop and crawled through the window because they’d already locked the front doors to the building. My first memory of Erin is from a writing workshop Fall 2004. She’s the kind of beautiful that makes men so dumbstruck that they lose their words, and when she read one her poems out loud in class I went the same kind of stupid, and looked at her thinking, holy shit, beauty and talent.

Sho’nuff, it’s true what they say—that a Masters program is designed to kill ya—but we got through it all with a lot wine and potluck dinners spent critiquing our poems and prose, talking about men, ill-fitting pants, what-have-you.

This is us then:

One of my most beloved photos on the planet. In this photo we’ve just finished our performances at a slam poetry event. We are thrilled.

This is us now:

Between then and now two babies have been born, jobs have been secured and quitted, boyfriends have been kicked to the curb, we’ve moved to new homes and cities, written novels (nearly finished), started urban farms and gardens, opened etsy shops, urged classrooms of children to be kind and creative, to realize their full potential, and through it all we’ve lent each other a hand, an ear, a kick in the pants. I wear my heart on my sleeve with these ladies and we’ve had a chain of emails ongoing for about seven years now, so they know it all…

In our tradition of potluck meals I hosted a potluck holiday dinner. I was planning to cook a grilled vegetables lasagna, but ended up making pizza instead. The artichoke heart and prosciutto pizza calls for shredded mozzarella and parmesan cheese, and after baking, it’s topped with arugula drizzled with lemon. I didn’t get a picture of the finished pizza with all the toppings and because Alyson is a vegetarian it ended up being a pizza buffet, which was fun. I served the prosciutto on the side, along with butternut squash and bell peppers for adding as desired.

Alyson brought a yummy spinach salad with persimmon, pomegranate seeds, goat cheese, and an oil/vinegar dressing. Erin made cinnamon rolls that were the perfect combination of doughy and crisp. We ate them warm, just out of the oven, with a powdered sugar icing drizzled on top.

Happy holidays, all! I hope you get to share some spectacular meals with loved ones this month.