🎄12 Days of Cheer with Asa-Mari Z: A quiet practice for ending the year well ✨

Written by Asa-Mari Z. ––

By the time December arrives, most people are exhausted by the noise. The inboxes are full, the feeds are frantic, and everyone is summarizing a year that still feels unfinished while being told, loudly and repeatedly, to prepare for the next one.

And yet, something quieter often surfaces around this time. A subtle awareness that what we actually need is not more pressure, but more presence. Not another plan, but a pause. Not a declaration of what comes next, but a chance to listen.

That quiet awareness is where 12 Days of Cheer begins.

The Challenge: The cultural script says December should be a sprint

This is the season when reflection is supposed to happen, but rarely does. Instead, we are handed checklists prefaced with platitudes cosplaying as wisdom. Resolutions masquerading as clarity. Productivity language dressed up as care.

Close the loop. Tie the bow. Squeeze meaning out of the final days as if they owe us something.

For creators, strategists, and people who build things for a living, this pressure is especially acute. We're expected to show proof of progress while simultaneously mapping the future. We are told to rest, but only after we have justified our worth. We are encouraged to reflect, but only in ways that can be optimized, shared, or monetized.

The result is a strange dissonance. We sense that something important is trying to surface, but we rush past it. We know we need space, but we fill it with noise. We feel the year closing, but we don't let it land.

If you're feeling it, please know it's not you; this is failure of design.

We built systems that reward speed, visibility, and certainty, even when none of those things are appropriate, and learn early on to push past endings instead of pausing to honor them and make them meaningful.

12 Days of Cheer was created as a response to that gap.

Solution: An invitation to look inward

For twelve days, I am sharing creative gifts: stories, tools, quiet insights. No platitudes, just practical magic drawn from the worlds I've built. Some days are reflective. Some are practical. All are offered in the spirit of clarity, care, and creative momentum.

The structure is intentional. Each day unlocks one gift. There is no rush to consume everything at once, and no expectation that you will keep up perfectly.

🎁 Arrive on your own time.

🎁 Open what's there.

🎁 Return when you're ready.

This is an exercise in self-actualization: giving the year a chance to speak before it disappears behind a calendar reset.

Each gift is designed to stand on its own, and is small by design, because small things are easier to carry.

And the goal is resonance.

We end with care so we can begin with clarity

When we slow the pace and lower the stakes, something interesting happens. Trust increases, attention deepens, and return behavior becomes natural rather than forced.

I'm a huge believer in ritual as a personal lighthouse – a way to find your way back to yourself when life becomes chaotic and noisy.

For those of us who build creative systems, tell stories, or guide others through complexity, the way we handle endings shapes how we approach beginnings.

When we end in a rush, we begin in a panic. 12 Days of Cheer is designed to remind us to slow down, listen, and align.

Strategy without reflection is just motion. Systems work best when they are aligned with the human beings using them. Each gift is an experiment in that alignment and a practice of attention.

The Takeaway: Direction is revealed through reflection

The deeper lesson of 12 Days of Cheer is about giving ourselves permission to acknowledge what's shifted this year without immediately packaging it into a lesson, and perhaps to sit with questions longer, rahter than race toward an answer.

Clarity does not arrive through brute force; rather, it arrives through space.

Creative momentum does not come from constant output. It comes from knowing what is worth carrying forward.

You don't need to resolve the year to move on from it. You only need to understand it a little better than you did before.

And that understanding is cumulative, building quietly, compounding over time.

12 Days of Cheer begins December 16. A new gift unlocks each day.

Follow along on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Bluesky for hints and reflections, and return to asamarizee.com daily to open the next gift.

There's nothing you need to prepare,and no commitment required. Just curiosity and a willingness to move a little more slowly than the world is asking you to.

Sometimes the most strategic thing you can do is end well.