prepping for winter

how this californian is attempting to prepare (and needs your help, pls!)

As you may know, I’m a bit anxious about the cold and dark winter ahead. Recently, I wrote a text to a raised-on-the-east-coast friend asking for recommendations for winter essentials, (both emotional ones and product recs), and her responses made me feel a lot better. So I’m here today, asking the same of all of you (if you’ll have me!).

In case it’s not abundantly obvious - I am 1. a planner, 2. from coastal California. It is pretty much always cold in California, and by this I mean it is the same temperature inside your house as it is outside, and the nights always drop in temperature, often in the 40s year round and the 30s in winter. But it’s never really really cold - the places I’ve lived have never really seen snow - plenty of frost, though. I can recall using my student ID to scrape the frost off our windshield at 645am so we could get to our “zero period” (← lol, what a scam) in high school, but that’s the closest I’ve come to shoveling snow.

Now that we live in Western Mass…