A New Year, A Timeless Way of Cooking

How We Welcome the New Year: With an Umu

Here on the ranch, we have Wi-Fi. That sentence still feels strange to write. Five years ago, if you’d asked me whether internet in the middle of nowhere—on this wild, windswept stretch of land—was possible, I would have laughed. Or said it sounded fake. Or like something a tech bro would promise and never quite deliver. And yet here we are, with surprisingly reliable Starlink (yes, yes—eye roll fully acknowledged), a thin but powerful lifeline connecting me to work, family, and friends who live worlds away.

We come down for Wi-Fi for an hour or two each day. I scroll more than I’d like to admit. I don’t love that about myself, but I do love something about it—the connection, the voyeurism, the way everyone collectively decides it’s time to recap their year. Lately, it’s been videos of traditions: recipes, tables, candles, matching pajamas. And somewhere between one reel and the next, it hit me—I don’t actually know where this year went.

It went too fast.

My baby turned into a toddler. She learned to walk, then to talk, then to dance and sing—like someone hit fast-forward when I wasn’t looking. And then I gave birth to another baby, making me a mother of two. Suddenly the world feels like it’s moving at a speed I didn’t consent to.

That’s where tradition comes in.

I didn’t grow up with many traditions. Every year looked different—different places, different plans, a kind of roaming chaos. It functioned, but I wanted the steadiness I saw in other families of rituals everyone knew without having to ask. I wanted the comfort of repetition. And now, building a family of my own here on this ranch, I’m realizing something quietly grounding: I finally get to make the traditions I always longed for—and decide what we come back to, year after year. And now for the third year, we returned to an umu.