753 Postcards and the Substack Commandments Nobody Asked For!

A Christmas essay about real food, year end thoughts, and what we owe each other

Dec 23, 2025

Hello friend,

I’m Neela — a Trini-American, a chronic foodie, and someone who exists in permanent cultural jet lag. This is my last article of the year, so I thought I’d mix it up today - kinda like my personality, kinda like American democracy. We’re going from humor to ham to parang to postcards. Buckle up, friends. It’s a whole thing.

Inspired by Dave Harland – See his LinkedIn version here.

Humor

The Ten Commandments of Substack

Thou shalt not announceth thy migration from Medium/LinkedIn/Twitter as though thou art Moses leading thy followers to the promised land, for literally nobody careth about thy platform drama.
Thou shalt not simply copy-paste thy Twitter thread into thy newsletter and calleth it “long-form content,” for thou art a lazy charlatan.
Thou shalt not starteth four different Substacks simultaneously (Writing Tips! Productivity! AI! Sourdough!), then abandoneth three of them by February, leaving thy confused subscribers wondering which version of thee to follow.
Thou shalt not announceth thou art “taking a break to recharge” after publishing for exactly five weeks. Thou art running a newsletter, not conquering Everest.
Thou shalt not asketh readers to comment their biggest takeaway or drop an emoji if they agree, for this is Substack, not LinkedIn, and we came here specifically to escapeth that nonsense.
Thou shalt not maketh thy free subscribers feeleth like second-class citizens by constantly reminding them what they’re missing, then wondereth why nobody upgradeth. Desperation is not a growth strategy, beloved.
Thou shalt not announceth thou art quitting thy job to write full-time when thou hast 83 subscribers and maketh $14/month. Thy courage is admirable but thy math skills are concerning.
Thou shalt not begineth every post with “I almost didn’t publish this...” for if thou truly weren’t going to publish it, we wouldn’t be reading it right now, would we?
Thou shalt not writeth a deeply personal essay about thy divorce/therapy/childhood trauma and then somehow pivoteth it to marketing tips in the last paragraph. The whiplash is giving us neck injuries.
Thou shalt not offereth a “Founding Member” tier for $600 that includeth “a 30-minute call with me” when literally nobody knoweth who thou art yet. Sir, this is a Wendy’s.

Amen 🙏

Ham

Speaking of things that feel performative versus real, which isn't just a Substack problem, is it? It's also what happens when you try to celebrate Christmas in someone else's country

Christmas in America still feels like borrowing someone else’s jacket, wearable, yes, but never quite made for my bones.

My husband feels it too. He and I have built our own version, a hybrid thing that’s neither here nor there, which is exactly where we live now.

We make trini ham that tastes almost right.

We play soca parang that the neighbors don’t understand.

For the uninitiated, parang is Trinidad's Christmas music, born from the Spanish-speaking Venezuelan migrants who arrived in the 1800s, bringing their aguinaldos and tradition of house-to-house serenades.

Trinidad took that and added drums, added soca's energy, added everything we were.

It's Spanish guitars meeting calypso rhythms in a way that should be a mess but is perfect. It’s infectious and loud enough to make you forget it's a gloomy 60 degrees outside in December.

We usually listen to this artist named Scrunter (Irwin Reyes Johnson). He is brilliant at taking traditional parang themes and adding that soca energy that makes people want to dance. “Piece ah Pork” has that contagious rhythm where the Spanish guitar meets the Caribbean beat. It was also my grandmother’s favorite, even though she never really ate pork lol.

I want a piece ah pork
I want a piece ah pork
I want a piece ah pork for me Christmas
I don’t want no Manacoo
Keep your Calaloo
I want a piece ah pork for me Christmas

Or we listen to traditional Trinidad Parang. The difference being that traditional parang stays closer to its Venezuelan roots: acoustic Spanish guitars, softer percussion, voices carrying centuries-old melodies in Spanish. It's beautiful, contemplative, and sounds something like this.

Daisy Voisin was the undisputed queen of parang, and nobody argued about that the way they argued about politics or religion. This is one of my favorite childhood songs. Alegria Alegria! Joy Joy!

The music is easy enough to stream across an ocean. The smells are harder.

My sister bought me a “trini Christmas candle.” Her way of trying to bottle up my mother's kitchen and mail it across the miles. It smells close enough to make me homesick.

Our kitchen is no longer crammed with aunties arguing about whose coconut sweet bread was superior - that dense, slightly sweet loaf studded with fresh coconut and raisins.

Every year, we bake batch after batch and distribute them to the people who’ve become our makeshift community here: the folks at our doctor’s office, the woman at the hair salon who remembers how we like our cuts, the senior center where my husband volunteers. It’s our way of saying we’re here, we’re grateful, and here’s a piece of where we come from.

It’s not the same. It will never be the same. But it’s ours.

Migration

I migrated in 2003, and Christmas in America felt like watching a movie of someone else’s life. The food was wrong. The music was wrong. The weather was definitely wrong. But what really changed was my mother’s voice on the phone three months after I left. “I love you,” she said, and I almost dropped the receiver. I was twenty-five years old, and those were the first times those three words had traveled between us in that direction.

My parents weren’t horrible. They were survivors of something harder than I’ll probably ever understand, and feelings were a luxury that their own parents never modeled. My mother wrote letters instead. When we fought about my teenage rebellion or my bad life choices or literally anything, I’d find a letter on my bed the next morning. As you can imagine, I received so many letters. 😂

Her penmanship was stunning, each word formed like she was illustrating a children’s book. I got very good at reading between the lines, at noticing the patterns.

After I moved to the United States, the letters became postcards because letters felt too heavy, too permanent. The postcards were lighter, easier, small enough to slip through the distance between us.

They arrived every few weeks. Sometimes twice a week. Cards with beaches that looked nothing like Trinidad’s beaches. Cards with flowers and birds and skylines. On the inside, her perfect cursive telling me about the garden, about the temple, about how my father lost another paycheck to the horses.

Over fourteen years, she sent me 753 postcards. I counted them after she died in 2017. Every single one is in a suitcase in my closet, the suitcase I’d grab if the house caught fire.

Me and my suitcase filled with my mom’s cards

I know postcards are terrible for the environment. I know we’re supposed to go digital. But some things need to exist in the world where you can hold them, where they can yellow at the edges and smell faintly like mothballs and someone else’s house.

Eight years after losing her, I've learned that connection finds new forms. Sometimes it's postcards in a suitcase. Sometimes it's strangers on the internet who become less strange over time.

This wasn’t a difficult year for me, and I’m almost embarrassed by that luck. While the world cracked in a thousand small ways, I stayed busy with solid projects. Work that filled my days, even when it didn’t always fill me up.

I keep saying I’ll pivot away from tech, the way other people keep saying they’ll finally write that novel or learn Portuguese or fix whatever isn’t quite working. But compared to so many others, people who lost work, lost certainty, I am absurdly, uncomfortably fortunate. Gratitude sits heavily on me this year.

I posted something online for the first time in June 2022, which means I’m still new-ish to this strange digital kitchen where we’re all cooking but nobody’s sure if anyone’s actually eating.

There was a time I shouted into a void. That’s no longer true.

So many of you shout back now, with encouragement, with your own stories. Thank you for being here, for reading, for subscribing, for buying me coffee, for existing in the same strange space at the same strange time.

Substack 2025 recap courtesy of Alejandro Aboy

I do what I can to support others with the time I have, which is never enough time, but that’s the arithmetic I’m working with.

I mess up. I offend people without meaning to. I have too many blindspots to count. If that’s been you, I’m sorry, I’m trying to do better.

Things will get harder in the coming years. I know this the way I know rain before it falls - something changes in the air, something changes in the light. So please, do what you can to lift people. We should want our digital friends to succeed, not in the abstract Instagram way where we double-tap and move on, but in the real way where we show up and help them carry things. Even the things we cannot see.

We cannot be there for everyone, that's just the reality. As creators and writers, we also carry things that you cannot see, but we can be there for someone. Pick one person daily whose work deserves more eyes and share it. Small acts, done with intention, compound into the kind of support that actually changes lives.

It’s true!

As Toni Morrison wrote, “You wanna fly, you got to give up the shit that weighs you down.” Maybe that means giving up competition, giving up scarcity thinking, giving up the idea that someone else’s success diminishes our own.

As I get ready to head north, I want to wish a Merry Christmas to those who celebrate it. Happy holidays to everyone working through whatever this season means to them, joy, grief, complicated family dynamics, or just another day with better food.

I’ll be gone from December 27th through January 4th, probably eating too much and thinking too little, which is exactly what I need.

Catch you when I get back.

A special shout-out to Kim Doyal and Steve Fendt for keeping me caffeinated through December.

Thank you to my friend/brother, Stuart Gus, for the Trinidad cake and coffee. Stuart has been trying to recreate Trini Christmas for me since we met in 2022.