When I was 16 I started babysitting for Helen Johnston. Helen Johnston was a wonderful woman and friend of my mothers. A young mom in her mid 30’s with the most adorable children you’ve ever seen.

Helen also had magazines. Glossy, fanned, current issue magazines. She had Food and Women’s Day, Vogue (which I’d never seen outside of a doctor’s office), Self and, the grand-daddy of in home publications, People. Ya’ll, she had a SUBSCRIPTION to People magazine.

To my teenage mind this meant two things:

Helen Johnston was REALLY rich. And . . .

Someday I wanted to be just like Helen Johnston.

The magazine seed had, in truth, been planted by  my mother years earlier. You see, to this day, mom keeps her old copies of magazines. And changes them out by season. In fact, if you went to her guest bath right now you’d find every Christmas issue of Country Living magazine going back to 1987. I swear, you can ask my sister.

There were ones that came all the time – Victoria was a favorite as was Country Home (which, to my young mind was somewhat more modern than Country Living). But then there was the biggy that I didn’t bother with during the year but at Christmas were EPIC. I am referring, of course, to the Christmas Good Housekeeping. I have no idea why, but at a very young age I can remember instinctively knowing what week in November this gem would show up in our mailbox. If I was really lucky, it would come on the same day as a delivery of Charle’s Chips, but that’s a post for another day (but man, those potato chips were TO DIE FOR).

And when we went to my grandmother’s? The magazines were a thing. We would all sit at her kitchen table in San Diego, a big stack of magazines and catalogs in front of us, and sip our drinks (Fresca for me) and read and chat and share what we’d read and show each other pictures. It was our quilting, I guess.

So it’s no surprise that even today, I am obsessed with magazines.

The titles have changed over the years. It’s now O, The Oprah Magazine, Real Simple, Southern Living and Coastal Living. And at Christmas, of course, it’s Good Housekeeping but also Martha Stewart because WHO does her photography? It’s almost other-worldly in it’s perfection. And the Southern Living Christmas essays are always well written and poignant – the writing just sappy enough to earn the holiday space but yet somehow deep and sincere. Not sure how they do that.

I fan them out just like Helen Johnston used to. No, actually I don’t because my dog likes to chew magazines, but in my mind I do. And sometimes I even have time to read them. Which I think is the point.

Sitting down with a magazine feels like an unbelievable luxury. A luxury that speaks of abundance – of time, yes, of money and even of address. It means that I am a woman who has made the time to read an amazing column or two, look at some pretty pictures and get some great recipe ideas. That I have cleared the room of distractions and yelling children, have made myself some tea and am going to just sit for a bit and turn those pages, one by one, and let myself be wherever they take me.

And that, Friends, is why I don’t think the magazine is dead. Because doing that on my Kindle is fine on an airplane, but not in my living room. And I like that time, and nobody can take it away from me.

Now I have to go because I just got news of a new Pioneer Woman magazine and I gotta get in on that on the ground floor. Because that’s going to be AMAZING.