About the Author

There is nothing that Kris likes more than writing about herself in the third person, so here goes: your hostess, Kris, recently moved her family north, from their far-too-cozy city apartment to a genteel little lakeside town filled with people who would mentally key your Volvo if you referred to their home as a suburb. Kris is approaching this new environment with anthropological delight, as she documents the thrills and travails of middle class life.   Consider this blog her field notes.

Why “Cheerful Abundance?”

Cheerful abundance is a personal philosophy, one started as a way of pushing back against mindless consumerism and learning to enjoy what we have instead of wanting more. Cheerful Abundance in the greater scheme of life is about never hearing a guest tell you your house looks like a Pottery Barn catalog, never buying a product just because a shelter magazine told you it was the next big thing, or feeling inadequate because your home isn’t as immaculately styled as a Nancy Meyers movie set.

Instead, it  is about being inspired by beauty, everywhere we find it. It’s about being grateful for the intangibles in life, surrounding ourselves with smart people and beautiful design, and about making our homes a place to celebrate, laugh, eat, and relax. It is about living in a home filled with things that serve as tangible reminders of our values, our best memories, and our goals. It is about embracing the ridiculous and the unchangeable in life; beautifying what we can, and laughing about the rest.

I am not suggesting that we shouldn’t ever buy anything, or want anything new. But life should be a late-summer English cottage garden – a little overgrown, filled with flowers, and well-used garden furniture, and a disreputable cat or two -  not a perfectly-styled catalog shoot, filled with impersonal ‘currently in’ objects that don’t mean anything to us other than as ways to signify our social class or habitus.

Cheerful Abundance is about being inspired to make life that garden. Kris, the gardener of this blog, is best known as a former editor of one of those big design blogs that cannot stop itself from linking to IKEA every day and trying to convince you that buying things is an acceptable substitute for having a life. In her spare time, she bakes, drools over the  giant ‘inspiration’ folder on her computer, and plans gorgeous rooms for houses she doesn’t own, and garden plans for the yards she doesn’t have.