Holiday Baking, NPR Best Books, Austen Advent, Guerilla Mosaics & More: Endnotes 05 December

Every Friday, we celebrate the weekend — and all the reading and relaxing and daydreaming time ahead — with Melissa's favorite book- and travel-related links of the week. Why work when you can read fun stuff?!

This post is part of our Endnotes series.

A yearning for the scent of vanilla and butter wafting in the air is a sure sign that it’s time to start planning holiday cookies. We’ve got you covered! King Arthur Flour — the OGs of excellent baking recipes — just published their 2025 cookie platter, a collection of six new recipes. (Hello, Sparkling Pistachio Cookies! In the ‘too much is just right’ category, Food52 serves up 56 holiday cookie recipes from their favorite bakers. Southern Living has opinions about the best cookie for a cookie swap, and The Washington Post shares 6 cookie baking tips they learned from smart recipes. Want to feed your mind along with your belly? Martha Stewart delves into the sweet-and-spicy history of gingerbread. We’re already daydreaming about our annual batch of Russian Teacakes.

• YES! One of the best distractions for this time of year: NPR’s best books of 2025.

• Deliciously related: 14 favorite cookbooks of the year (WaPo_ gift link) and best cookbooks of the year (Country Life magazine).

• This year’s 2025 Holiday Gift Guide from Word Bookstores is excellent. Their recommendations are divided into creative and super helpful (and cute!) categories like, ‘books with cozy elven café vibes’ and ‘books for the people who listen to crime podcasts to fall asleep.’

• We talked about the magic of cabinets of curiosity in our podcast episode Museums: A Gathering of Muses, A Clutch of Curators. This essay from The Public Domain Review is packed with fascinating facts and beautiful paintings of these art-filled spaces.

• ‘Nana’s flat was probably the most enchanting house of my childhood. Although I snooped through quite a few of its nooks and crannies during the many visits we took there, there was always something more to discover, and never enough time.’ Treat yourself to the rest of the essay Nana’s House: Cheese Puffs, Seashells, and the Art of Conversation.

• A Jane Austen (video) advent calendar! Dr. Olivia Cox is marking the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth with daily tidbits about the author’s life. Get the entire playlist here.

• The ‘unexpected joy’ of guerilla mosaic makers. ‘From Southampton to Sarajevo, urban mosaicists are transforming city spaces and bringing communities together – one tile at a time.’ The photos!

• The m-dash, demystified. I love you, m-dash, now and forever.

• I clicked so quickly on this: This Luxurious Holiday Train Journey Takes You to Europe’s Best Christmas Markets. Twelve days! Private brass band! Gingerbread tasting! Horse-drawn carriage ride!

• It’s never too soon to start daydreaming. CN Traveler has ideas about the best places to go in 2026. (I’m very distracted by the pretty interior of the cocktail bar in Medellín, Colombia.)

• Delicious! The meaning of food in Shakespeare. ‘[I]n Shakespeare’s plays, roasts, ales, and pies are not props, but clues to characters’ souls, moods, and motivations.’

• From Crime Reads, 10 new books this week.

• This is a well-written essay that’s gifted us with the sentence: ‘I cannot bring myself to believe that Emily Brontë would be turning over in her grave at the idea of Jacob Elordi tightening breathless Barbie’s corset.’

• Related: Rare Wuthering Heights First Edition Discovered in Hollywood. ‘It’s so, so rare to find one like this. The UK first edition is a unicorn at this point, but the first American edition is also a notorious rarity, especially in the original cloth. It was cheaply made for a mass audience, which contributes to its scarcity – it was never intended to last. You’re seeing it exactly as the first readers did. It felt a bit like unearthing a ghost.’

• A few of these most popular literary names for dogs and cats are very surprising.

BRB, time to bust out the gingerbread-scented candle.

Top image courtesy of Luna Hu.