Week 27

An advent comic for the festive season.

Hello Chumholes,

For the last couple of years I have made a little cute advent comic for Rachel, each paper panel folded and tucked into a wooden advent calendar. This year I’m not sure where that calendar is, no doubt tucked into one of the many new storage lockers we bought pre-baby. So I thought I would do it here.

I’m publishing each of the panels daily here on notes and on insta stories but I thought I would use this weekly missive to round up all the panels of that week. So it’ll be each week now until Christmas. Some days will be more panels than others, probably one to three per day.

Thanks to those that responded to the poll last week, it seems most emails are still going to primary so that’s great. But a reminder if it is going to a different box to simply add this email address to your Google Contacts. You can do that here and just add stacygougoulis@substack.com in there.

Enjoy. Let me know what you think will happen next.

This Week I Learned…

Of the death of my grandmother. I’m heading back to Perth this weekend for the funeral. She was my last remaining grandparent. As I said to my sister, we are now grand-orphans. I loved her very much and feel very lucky to have had her as such a big part of my life. Her and Papou would pick us up from school and take us back to their place where she would make me a sandwich of lettuce and feta cheese with margarine on toasted bread. Or else a snack of white bread dipped in milk (I thought this was a normal snack for most of my life) and we would watch Days of Our Lives and I would go and grab an old yellowing Peanuts book off the shelf. I may have more to say about her in the future, to be honest it’s just happened and I’m still processing, but something I have noticed is how often all my grandparents come into my thoughts and make their way into my essays. They are very much a part of me and I carry them all around inside me. So I thought this week I would just share this piece I wrote in 2021, which features my Yiayia. It’s about memory. She had been diagnosed with dementia by then and the effects were starting to make themselves known but I don’t think it’s a heavy read or anything.