Category: Lifestyle

The Evolution of Maysgiving: A Family Tradition Story

Seven Maysgivings. That is where we are.

If you had told me seven years ago that I would still be doing this, that it would grow into something with recipes and traditions and meaning layered upon meaning, I think I would have laughed. I just wanted a reason to make stuffing in May.

But here we are.

Year One was the experiment. I was not sure anyone would take it seriously. My family showed up a little skeptical and left asking when we were doing it again. That was enough for me.

Year Two, I started taking notes. Not formal ones, just little scribbles. What worked on the table, what felt right, what I wanted to remember. The cranberry sauce recipe got locked in that year. It has not changed since.

Year Three brought more people and more food. I learned that Maysgiving scales beautifully. You can do it for four people or fourteen. The spirit is the same.

Year Four was the one I almost skipped. Life was full. Schedules were impossible. But I set the table anyway, and I am so glad I did. That year reminded me that traditions are most important when they feel hardest to keep.

Year Five, my boys started helping with the cooking. That changed everything. Watching them understand that we do this on purpose, that we choose gratitude, that we make it happen, was one of the most quietly beautiful parenting moments I have had.

Year Six, I realized I had a real body of work on my hands. Seven years of recipes. Seven years of reflections. Seven years of stories from around the table. Something kept nudging me to write it down properly.

Year Seven, I did.

The Maysgiving Table started as a family dinner. It became a tradition. And now it is a book. A cookbook-memoir that holds everything I have learned, cooked, laughed over, and been grateful for across seven years of intentional celebration.

Each Maysgiving has been different. Each one has taught me something. And all of it is in the book.

Available Now!

I even wrote a whole Thanksgiving Music Album!!! Enjoy a listen.

May 7, 2026
What Is Maysgiving?

(And Why May Is My Favorite Month)

Every year, right in the middle of May, something shifts in my house. The good dishes come out. The table gets set like it means something. There is a turkey, cranberry sauce, stuffing, and pie. And no, it is not November.

It is Maysgiving. The 4th Thursday of May; this year it’s the 28th!

If you are new here, let me catch you up. Maysgiving is my annual May Thanksgiving tradition, and it has been a part of our family’s life for seven years now. Same feast. Same gratitude. Same intentionality that the holidays bring, but without the cold weather, the travel stress, or the pressure of someone else’s schedule telling you when to be thankful.

I started it because I wanted a reason to slow down in the middle of an otherwise full season. May is this beautiful, busy, blooming time of year, and I kept rushing through it. I wanted to mark it. To sit at the table and mean it.

So I made one up.

The first Maysgiving was simple. I cooked too much food, the house smelled amazing, and somewhere in the middle of it, something clicked. This was going to be a tradition. And it has been, every single year since.

Over the years, Maysgiving has grown. The table has gotten fuller, the recipes have gotten more refined, and the meaning behind it has deepened in ways I did not expect. It is not just about the food. It is about creating a moment in the calendar that belongs to gratitude. A reset. A breath. A reason to gather before the summer heat takes over and everyone scatters.

May is also, not coincidentally, my favorite month. The weather in Southern California is just right. Everything is green and blooming. There is this collective feeling in the air of something good coming. Maysgiving fits right into that.

I share all of this because I want you to understand what Maysgiving is before I tell you about the book. It is not just a themed dinner. It is a philosophy. A decision to say that gratitude does not have to wait until November. That the table is worth setting any time of year.

Now, seven years in, I have written it all down.

Buy your copy today!!

May 4, 2026
Left Out Song Cycle: Writing About Family Exclusion Through Music

What is the Left Out album about? Left Out is an eight-song cycle by Melanie Grace about the experience of family exclusion, the particular pain of being on the outside of relationships that should have included you, and the long process of healing from that kind of hurt. If you have ever felt left out by your own family, this album was written specifically for you.

When the Hardest Songs Are the Most Necessary

There are songs you write because they are joyful and the melody just arrives and you ride it all the way to the end. And then there are songs you write because you have no other choice, because the thing has to get out or it will keep accumulating weight inside you forever. Left Out fell firmly and completely into the second category. Writing an eight-song cycle about family exclusion required me to go back into rooms I had locked up carefully and sit there until the songs came all the way out.

When you write about family pain, when you are drawing from actual experiences of being on the outside of something you should have been included in as a matter of course, you cannot do it from a safe distance. You have to go all the way in. You have to be willing to feel the thing with full presence in order to translate it accurately into something a stranger could recognize as true.

How Does Personal Songwriting Create Universal Connection?

What I found in writing Left Out was the central paradox of all deeply personal music: the more specific you are about the actual texture of an experience, the more universal the result becomes. When you name the precise quality of a feeling rather than gesturing toward it in general terms, something remarkable shifts in the listener. They stop being an outside observer and start recognizing themselves in what you wrote.

The responses have confirmed this completely and repeatedly. People send messages that say I thought I was completely alone in this. They say I did not know this particular hurt had a soundtrack until now. They say thank you for being willing to say the thing out loud so I did not have to say it alone. Those messages are the entire reason to write songs about family exclusion rather than keeping those stories locked inside where they cannot reach anyone.

What Did Writing Left Out Teach You About Songwriting?

It taught me that restraint is one of the most powerful craft tools available. There is a version of a song about family pain that is pure catharsis, all volume and accusation and unfiltered grief. And then there is the version that is controlled and precise, where the most devastating lines are delivered quietly, almost conversationally. Left Out pushed me consistently toward the quieter version and I believe the album is significantly stronger for it.

I am proud of this project. Not just for what it says about the experience, but for the fact that I said it at all. If you have ever felt left out by the people who were supposed to keep you in, those songs are for you. You were seen in the writing of them. You were not the only one.

April 21, 2026
Through It All: A Wedding Anniversary Song and What 15 Years of Marriage Really Looks Like

What is Through It All about? Through It All is a love album by Melanie Grace released in February 2026. It explores what it means to love someone through the hard seasons as well as the beautiful ones, drawing on fifteen years of real marriage. It is about the kind of love that does not quit even when quitting would be easier.

Fifteen Years

Today is our anniversary. Fifteen years. I have tried to write this blog post four separate times this morning and every single time I reach this sentence I stop and sit with it for a moment. Fifteen years. When I think about the girl who stood at that altar in 2011 and said yes, I want to take her by the hands and tell her: you have no idea what is coming. And it is so much more than you are imagining right now.

Marriage is not a fairy tale. Anyone who has actually been in one for fifteen years will tell you that plainly and without hesitation. It is two very real people, with very real flaws, choosing each other on the easy days and the hard ones, the days when love feels completely effortless and the days when it requires everything you have and then asks for a little more.

What Is a Wedding Anniversary Song About?

That question is what led me to write Through It All. I started the album in February with Valentine’s Day as the anchor point, but the deeper I went into the writing, the more the project revealed itself as a philosophy of love rather than just a collection of romantic tracks. What does it mean to love somebody not just on the peak days but through the ordinary and the difficult ones? What does it mean to stay, to choose again, to rebuild when something breaks, to say I am still here even when everything else is hard?

My husband is woven into every single track on that album. Not because every song is a literal love letter to him specifically, but because the way I understand what love is at all, the way I know what it means to be chosen by someone and to keep choosing them back, comes entirely from fifteen years of building a shared life with this person. He is in the foundation of every word I wrote.

Why This Anniversary Feels Different

This year, celebrating fifteen years feels qualitatively different because I am also celebrating the version of me who finally started releasing music. He has believed in my songwriting longer than I have believed in it myself. He has listened to voice memos at midnight and said that one is really something. He has watched me build this entire music career in 2026 and cheered from the front row without ever once making me feel like it was too much or too ambitious or too late.

There is a lyric in the Through It All title track about the kind of love that shows up even when it is tired. The love that laughs even when it is scared. That lyric is about him. Happy anniversary to the man who has always believed in my music, even on the days I did not. I love you more than any song I have ever written. And I have written a lot of songs.

April 16, 2026
You Chose Me – When the Gospel Becomes Personal

There Is a Difference Between “Everyone” and “Me”

It is possible to believe the gospel in general and still struggle to believe it personally.

Most of us have heard “God loves you” enough times that it has almost become furniture. Background noise. True, sure, but abstract in a way that does not quite land.

“You Chose Me” is about the moment the abstraction becomes specific. When “God loves the world” becomes “You love me.” When “He chooses the lost” becomes “You chose me.”

That shift is everything.

Writing Directly to God

This song is a second-person address. It speaks directly to God, not about Him. And that changes the emotional register completely.

Singing about God is one thing. Singing to God is another. The second version requires vulnerability that the first does not. Because when you are singing to someone, you have to actually believe they are listening. You have to be willing to say the tender, specific thing.

“You chose me” is a tender, specific thing to say.

It is an acknowledgment of need. It is a statement of wonder. It is an act of receiving something that you did not earn and cannot fully explain.

The Feeling: Tender Wonder

If the title track “Chosen by Grace” is the theological declaration, “You Chose Me” is the personal response to it. The two songs are in conversation with each other.

Where “Chosen by Grace” says “this is true,” “You Chose Me” says “I receive it. I believe it about myself. Thank You.”

The feeling is tender. Almost fragile. Because receiving grace can feel fragile, especially if you have spent a long time not believing you deserved it. There is a moment in receiving something truly unearned where you almost want to look behind you and make sure they are talking to you.

This song is that moment. Looking at God and saying: You actually mean me. You chose me.

What Scripture Speaks to This Song

John 15:16 “You did not choose me, but I chose you and appointed you so that you might go and bear fruit, fruit that will last, and so that whatever you ask in my name the Father will give you.”

Jesus says this directly to His disciples. And because we are grafted into that same family, it is spoken to us too. The initiative belongs to Him. He chose.

Deuteronomy 7:6 “For you are a people holy to the Lord your God. The Lord your God has chosen you out of all the peoples on the face of the earth to be his people, his treasured possession.”

Treasured possession. That is the language of someone who deeply values what they hold.

Zephaniah 3:17 “The Lord your God is with you, the Mighty Warrior who saves. He will take great delight in you; in his love he will no longer rebuke you, but will rejoice over you with singing.”

God rejoices over you. With singing. He does not tolerate your presence. He celebrates it.

Ephesians 1:4-5 “For he chose us in him before the creation of the world to be holy and blameless in his sight. In love he predestined us for adoption to sonship through Jesus Christ, in accordance with his pleasure and will.”

Before the creation of the world. The choosing predates your mistakes, your wandering, your doubt, your best and worst moments. It was decided before any of that existed.

A Note on Receiving

I think one of the most spiritually significant things we can do is practice receiving. Not performing. Not earning. Receiving.

For many of us, receiving does not come naturally. It feels passive or undeserved. But receiving grace is actually an act of faith. It says: I believe You. I believe this is real. I believe it is about me and not just people in general.

“You Chose Me” is a song of receiving. An act of faith set to melody.

If you have been holding grace at arm’s length, this song is an invitation to let it be personal. To look up and say: You mean me. And actually believe it.

Listen Now

Stream “Chosen by Grace” on all major platforms. Visit themelaniegrace.com for direct listening links and more song stories.

Next week: “Walk This Road,” a song for the long stretches of the faith journey.

Follow Melanie Grace at themelaniegrace.com for devotional content, song stories, and faith-based music.

April 12, 2026