December has a way of asking everything of the women who hold everyone else together. There are the gifts, the travel, the year-end deadlines, and the family table you’re probably setting yourself. Then January arrives and tells you to be more disciplined about all of it.
On the longest night of the year, I’m inviting you to sit down instead.
Devoted to Her is this year’s Soft Life Supper, an intimate seated dinner for Black and brown women, held on the Winter Solstice in the Washington, DC area. For four hours, somebody else does the caring. A chef cooks three courses, someone hands you a glass when you walk in, and the conversation goes further than small talk because I’ll be guiding it between courses.
This year’s supper continues a conversation we started at our fall salon about self-devotion. Discipline asks what you can force. Devotion asks what you love enough to return to. So in place of the usual December question about what you’re going to fix next year, we’ll spend the evening with a different one: what are you devoted to, and how do we cultivate a life that honors that?
We’ll close the night around the fire, naming what we’re ready to set down before the year turns and what we’re choosing to carry into the light. You don’t need to prepare anything or arrive with the right words.
What’s included
- A chef-prepared, three-course seated dinner
- Wine and cocktails
- A conversation guided through the evening by Esther Boykin, MFT
- A solstice fire ritual to close the night
- A gift at every place setting
This table is for you if
- You’re the one who hosts, remembers, and checks on everybody, and you can’t recall the last time someone set a table for you
- You want to end the year in the company of Black and brown women who know what it is to carry a lot
- You’re more interested in what you’re devoted to than in another resolution
- You’ve been curious about a Compassion Collective retreat and want to feel what one evening of it is like
The details
- Sunday, December 20, 2026, 5 to 9 pm
- A private venue in the DC area. Registered guests receive the exact address three days before.
- $375 a seat, or Bring Your Bestie: two seats for $600
- It’s one table, so seats are limited
- Registration closes Tuesday, December 15 at midnight ET
Your host for the evening
Esther Boykin, MFT, is a writer, cultural strategist, and guide, and the founder of Compassion Collective, where she creates retreats, salons, and suppers rooted in self-compassion and communal care for high-achieving Black women. She spent more than two decades as a marriage and family therapist, and you’ll feel that in how she hosts: she pays attention to the women at her table, so the night can get quieter, louder, or a little silly when it needs to.
Her new book, Self-Care Is a Scam, comes out January 12, 2027. It makes the case that the self-care we’ve been sold was never enough to save us, and that what we need is a new way of being. Signed copies are available to pre-order at selfcareisascam.com.