O Christmas Tree...

This is how I spent my weekend...

I think this is the earliest I've ever put up my Christmas decorations but, judging by my Facebook feed, I'm not the only one. There is something about a Christmas tree that is immediately cheering (never underestimate the power of glitter!) particularly after the year we've all had.

Our tree is an artificial one but when I was growing up my family had always had a real tree. Our house had a huge bay window at the front and my parents were determined to fill it with tree, so they would always buy the biggest one they could find - sometimes the top would end up being bent over to fit. My mother tried every method she could think of to keep the tree alive and the needles intact until Christmas. The best solution turned out to be just sticking the tree in a bucket of water like a bunch of flowers. Christmas trees don't much like the heat, but that was never much of a problem living in a Victorian house!

When I was a teenager I decided I wanted my own Christmas tree in my room. I think I must have been heavily influenced by old Hollywood movies because I bought a white one from Woolworths and, copying the Harrods shop window from the previous year, decorated it in baubles of just one colour. Some people loved it, some hated it! I still have the tree but my daughter has claimed it for herself - it's 'vintage'!

When I left home I tried to recreate my family's Christmas traditions (you can read more about that here) but I eventually learnt that the best thing is to continue the traditions that work for you but not be afraid to create 'new' ones. My mother gave me a few packs of baubles to start me off but over the years I began to collect individual ornaments, a couple each Christmas, mostly from garden centres and high street stores. I can pretty much tell you where each one came from and the story behind it.

For many years the most famous ornament on my tree was the 'Harrods' bauble, which (as you can probably tell!) I bought in about 1989. It was hugely expensive at the time and it was a complete pain to get it back to Hampshire without breaking it, but it's still on my tree all these years later!

Several of my ornaments were bought for me by my friend Trisha Ashley. We both share a love of traditional glass ornaments. One memorable year we both bought each other typewriter baubles (Trisha bought the red one, I bought the black one) - great minds think alike!

I love fairy toadstools and mice and nutcrackers, so there are several of those sprinkled over the tree. I also love the way light shines through glass, so there are lots of glass ornaments too. About five years ago I realised my tree was stuck in the 1980s, so I no longer use tinsel. The poor tree seemed a bit bare until I got used to it but I've realised you can now see the decorations properly!

Sadly, my mother died earlier this year. When my brother and sister-in-law were sorting through her things they found a mysterious cardboard box with a note attached to the top which said, "For Louise".

What was inside? 

The family box of Christmas decorations...

If you'd like to know more about my Christmas decorations, my daughter has challenged me to post a festive picture on my Instagram in the days leading up until Christmas.

Related Posts:

How My Grandmother Invented Our Family Christmas

A Very Marley Christmas

Let It Snow

The Inspiration Behind You Make It Feel Like Christmas

My Best 'Worst' Christmas (a guest post for Heidi Swain)

Guest Post: Hazel Prior: Why Penguins?

If you follow me on Twitter you might have noticed that I've been raving about a book called Away with the Penguins by Hazel Prior. It's a fabulous, feel-good book, about an elderly lady who decides to leave all her money to a penguin research facility in Antarctica - on condition they allow her to visit first! Today I am thrilled to welcome Hazel to my blog to explain exactly what it is about penguins that made her want to write about them!

Why penguins? This is a question I’ve been asked a lot recently. You don’t get many novels that feature a colony of penguins, and when I first thought of bringing them together with a curmudgeonly eighty-five-year old heroine, I did wonder if I could pull it off. However, I’m a strong believer in writing about what you love—how can you possibly sustain the intense, long-term commitment that you put into a novel otherwise? And the idea just tickled my fancy.

I’d already written my first book ELLIE AND THE HARP MAKER, around my favourite things: Celtic harps, kind and eccentric characters and Exmoor countryside. I was lucky to get a two-book deal with the publishers Penguin Random House, and was so excited and proud that I was namedropping ‘Penguin’ at every opportunity. So when it came to the decision about what book 2 would be about, that little quirky bird hopped into my head.

The more I thought about it, the more I liked it. I could set the novel in Antarctica—what an opportunity to take my readers to such a wild and magical place! I couldn’t afford to go there myself but I knew I’d enjoy researching it and conjuring up the details in my imagination. What’s more I knew someone who could help…

I happen to have a close friend who is crazy about penguins and she has an inspirational story of her own. Several years ago her husband died very suddenly but she found an unusual strategy for dealing with her grief: She decided to travel around the world and take photos of every species of penguin in its natural habitat. She has now amassed fabulous photos of seventeen species of penguin. Only one more to go! She’s gained enormous joy and solace from her penguin trips, and this made me think about nature as a healer.

One of my own strategies for dealing with grief, illness or hardship is to turn to books and I know that many people do the same. For this reason I always want my writing to be uplifting in some way, so I show characters who face challenges but manage to overcome them.

As I started to research penguins, I realised that I had chosen exactly the right creature for this purpose. Penguins set us a wonderful example. They live in the harshest conditions on the planet and yet face their daily challenges with incredible cheerfulness, determination and gusto. They’re sociable birds, too. As my plot developed I realised they could teach my heroine, Veronica McCreedy, a lesson. Veronica is disillusioned with the human race because of the way she’s been treated in the past, but the penguins show her the importance of community and mutual support.

My job as a writer is to tell a good story and entertain people, not to preach. But I do like to deal with serious issues, wrap them up in a bit of fun and maybe provoke a thought or two. Scientists study the fluctuations in penguin colonies because they indicate key environmental changes, so in writing this book I’ve touched on some of the devastating effects of climate change. The environmental crisis has loomed large in the public psyche recently but this isn’t just me jumping onto a bandwagon; I wrote my novel’s first draft before anyone had even heard of Greta Thunberg. The publication of AWAY WITH THE PENGUINS is timely, though, and I’m glad that my quirky Antarctic story adds another small voice to the clamour for change.

How did I research penguins? As well as quizzing my penguin-obsessed friend and poring over her photographs, I spent many happy hours watching penguin footage on YouTube. I read books about penguins from cover to cover. There are blogs on the British Antarctic Survey website written by scientists who study penguins in the Antarctic South Shetlands, so that was incredibly useful. I went to visit some real penguins, too, at Living Coasts, a sea-life centre in Torquay. The staff there generously shared all sorts of penguin facts and figures.

I was thrilled to meet Yoyo, a very friendly penguin who was hand-reared. When the book came out in hardback I went back to show him.

He liked it so much he wanted to eat it!

Sadly, this year Living Coasts had to be closed due to the pandemic, but Yoyo and his friends have apparently settled well in their new home in Wales.

Like most people, I find penguins charming and funny. It’s almost impossible to look at a penguin without smiling. For this reason, and to celebrate the book’s recent Richard & Judy Book Club success, I ran a penguin drawing competition on Twitter. Do check it out here if you’d like some light relief from this very difficult year. https://www.hazeltheharpist.co.uk/penguins

Finally, a BIG THANK YOU for having me, Louise! And I think it’s appropriate to end with this quote from John Ruskin, which I’ve used at the beginning of my book: "I find penguins at present the only comfort in life… One can’t be angry when one looks at a penguin..."

Away With The Penguins

Veronica McCreedy is about to have the journey of a lifetime...

Veronica McCreedy lives in a mansion by the sea. She loves a nice cup of Darjeeling tea whilst watching a good wildlife documentary. And she’s never seen without her ruby-red lipstick.

Although these days Veronica is rarely seen by anyone because, at 85, her days are spent mostly at home, alone.

She can be found either collecting litter from the beach (‘people who litter the countryside should be shot’), trying to locate her glasses (‘someone must have moved them’) or shouting instructions to her assistant, Eileen (‘Eileen, door!’).

Veronica doesn’t have family or friends nearby. Not that she knows about, anyway... And she has no idea where she’s going to leave her considerable wealth when she dies.

But today... today Veronica is going to make a decision that will change all of this.

Amazon UK

Amazon USA 

(published as How the Penguins Saved Veronica)

About Hazel

Hazel Prior was born in Oxford but has lived in many places including the Welsh borders, Scotland, south-west England and Italy. Her jobs have included harp-playing, teaching English as a foreign language and acting. She has won nine prizes in national writing competitions and has had a number of short stories published in literary magazines. Currently working as a freelance harpist, Hazel lives on Exmoor with her husband and a huge ginger cat.

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Twitter  @HazelPriorBooks

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Inspiration: You Make It Feel Like Christmas

I first had the idea for You Make It Feel Like Christmas way back in 2014 while I was at the cinema watching Guardians of the Galaxy. You can't see the connection between a superhero movie and a Christmas romantic comedy? Well, the soundtrack featured an old 70s song called Hooked on a Feeling and the lyrics got me thinking about people who have (for one reason or another) become stuck on a certain way of thinking.

I often have ideas for stories that I scribble down in a notebook and then promptly forget about but this one stayed in my mind. A few years later, when the mystery novel I was working on wasn't coming together in the way I wanted (I'll be blogging about that later), I decided to start something completely different. I remembered those characters who'd become 'hooked on a feeling' and You Make It Feel Like Christmas began to take shape.

Beth is obsessed with the idea of having a perfect family Christmas and still has feelings for the man that broke her heart seven years ago. Aidan associates Christmas spent at his family home with a tragic period in his life and would happily see the house flattened, whereas his brother Nick remembers his idyllic childhood and will do anything to save it.

I didn't realise until I'd finished writing the book that my feelings about the house I'd grown up in had also found their way into the story. This might have been because part of the book was written there while I was visiting my mother. We talked a lot about the 'old days' and the amount of work it had taken to restore the house.

My childhood home

My parents bought their house back in the 1970s. It was their dream house and restoring it became their hobby - except they didn't restore it in a traditional way! Instead, they trawled reclamation sites buying quirky fittings from old houses that had been demolished. Although the house was Victorian they added oak beams to the sitting room ceiling (original 300-year-old ship's timbers!) along with a huge Tudor fireplace.

I asked my mother why they'd chosen to do this and she explained that they had loved visiting old houses, with all their history, and wanted to recreate a little bit of that in their own home.

The appearance of the Abbey in my story was influenced by much bigger real-life houses, including Lyndhurst Mansion in Tarrytown, New York (also the location for the 1970s horror film House of Dark Shadows) and Newstead Abbey in Nottinghamshire (once home to Lord Byron - who also gets a mention!).

Newstead Abbey

When I wrote the book, I'd recently moved into one of the first houses on a new estate and for the next year I effectively lived on a building site. This probably influenced my decision to make Aidan a builder!

Like Agatha in You Make It Feel Like Christmas, my grandmother was heavily into crafting. I remember her making me jewellery out of rose hips, and jack-'o-lanterns out of turnips - they were super-scary! - and Christmas decorations out of real holly, ivy and fir cones, which she'd sprinkle with glitter or spray gold (this was the 80s!). My grandmother also told me the stories behind the traditions of decorating our houses with greenery, and the legend of Balder and Loki.

In You Make It Feel Like Christmas the Holly family have an heirloom box of decorations going back to the 1960s - so did my mother. Earlier in the story, when Nick decorates his tree with some very unusual baubles, he explains to Beth how much they mean to him. This is something that is also important to me. I've collected the decorations for my own tree over many years and every one has a story behind it.

Lucy's experience of driving through a snowstorm happened to me! Hearing the sound of compacted ice scrape the underside of my car is not one I'd care to repeat! 

Ophelia's fabulous high fruit, low sugar mince pies are based on my own recipe.

And the Holly family's usual Christmas - dinner at lunchtime, an afternoon spent watching the Christmas movie on TV, eating leftovers and Quality Street, and playing Death-by-Scrabble?

I wonder where I got that idea from?

Related Posts:

A Very Marley Christmas

How Grandma Invented my Family's Christmas

Marley's Marvellous Mincemeat

Newstead Abbey: Lords Behaving Badly

Get Noted

Guest Post: Heidi Swain: Feeling Festive in Nightingale Square

This week I'm thrilled to welcome Sunday Times bestselling author Heidi Swain to my blog. Heidi is famous for her heart-warming, feel-good stories set in Norfolk and today she's going to tell us about her latest novel, The Winter Garden...

Hello everyone! Thank you so much for finding your way to this post and thank you to Louise for kindly offering me a spot on her blog. It’s now a week since The Winter Garden was published and I thought it might be the ideal opportunity to share with you a little of the inspiration behind this first festive trip to Nightingale Square. 

As some of you probably already know, I write two books a year and have done practically since I was first published in 2015. Broadly speaking, one is a summer book and one is a winter, or Christmas book. When I settled down to plan the winter 2020 release, I glanced at my pile of books and realised that the four festive titles I had written so far were all set in the same place – the much-loved fictitious Fenland town of Wynbridge. 

Two things occurred to me as I admired the foil enhanced covers. Firstly, I realised that I would rather like to visit Wynbridge in the summer for a change (A Taste of Home set in the Fenland countryside will be released next April. Yay!) and secondly, I was pretty certain that the neighbours in Nightingale Square would very much like to show us how they prepare for and celebrate Christmas in the fine city of Norwich.

Much like moving to a brand-new setting when your readers are so invested in the familiar one, it was a scary prospect, changing the festive location, but one I was willing to embrace. The vibrant city of Norwich, the pretty Square with its central green, the community garden across the road at Prosperous Place, along with the gardens attached to the house, all proved to be ideal for showcasing festive events and communal gatherings as the plotting and planning developed, but ultimately, I wanted the book to be about so much more than that. 

The short, dark days take their toll on many of us and I wanted to use the garden to show that even in the depths of winter there is still some light to be enjoyed along with many horticultural highlights, irrespective of whether your heart belongs in the country or the city. Hence, the arrival of a new face in the Square, gardener Freya, and her nervy but lovable rescue dog, Nell. 

Freya’s timely advent (no pun intended) led to the birth of the Winter Garden which quickly formed a surprising seasonal treat for the senses and became packed full of highly scented shrubs, vibrant flowers and some surprisingly tactile textures. Throw artist, Norse god lookalike, Finn into the mix for a romantic twist and I’d created some pretty spectacular fireworks too! 

Two of the characters in The Winter Garden suffer with Seasonal Affective Disorder (SAD) and one creates something rather wonderful alongside the garden to put a stop to it getting the upper hand. I’m not going to reveal what it is, in the hope that you might decide to pick up or download the book yourself, and if you do, I hope you will give some of the things the Nightingale Square neighbours delight in, a go yourself. 

I have a feeling that during the next few months we are all going to need more distractions than ever and continuing to build our connections to nature and getting outside at every opportunity will be a sure-fire way to ensure that we keep those happy chemicals fizzing away and fired up in our brains. And so, all that remains for me to do now is to wish you a wonderful winter season packed full of outdoor adventures. I very much hope to meet you in The Winter Garden! 

With love 

Heidi x

About Heidi...

Although passionate about writing from an early age, Heidi Swain gained a degree in Literature, flirted briefly with a newspaper career, married and had two children before she plucked up the courage to join a creative writing class and take her literary ambitions seriously.

A lover of vintage paraphernalia and the odd bottle of fizz, she now writes feel good fiction with heart for Simon and Schuster.

Her debut novel, The Chery Tree Café was published in July 2015 and since then she has had a further ten books published, becoming a Sunday Times Bestseller in 2017. She is currently celebrating the release of her 2020 festive title, The Winter Garden.

Heidi is represented by Amanda Preston and lives in Norfolk with her family and a mischievous cat called Storm.

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Publisher: Simon & Schuster UK     Books and the City 

The Winter Garden:  Amazon UK     Amazon USA

New Book, Coming Soon...

After four years (yes, I know!) you might have wondered if you were ever going to see a new book from me (and that's the subject of a whole other blog post!).

So today I am thrilled to show you the cover of my new book, You Make It Feel Like Christmas, which will be out on 22nd September 2020. Isn't it beautiful? 

If you follow me on Facebook you might have already had a sneak preview because I couldn't resist posting the cover when I heard the news that ITV will be filming their new series of I'm A Celebrity here in North Wales, at Gwrych Castle - just down the road from where I used to live. I love watching I'm a Celebrity and Gwrych Castle is one of my favourite Welsh castles.

What does that have to do with my new book? Well...

For twenty years the Holly family have used their television show to claim that anyone can have a perfectly organised Christmas.

Now they've been asked to prove it - from a tumbledown castle in the middle of nowhere...

Well, at least no one will be eating bugs in my book!

If you'd like to know more about You Make It Feel Like Christmas, all the details are on my website, along with a short extract.

And if you're a book blogger, maybe you'd be interested in joining the book tour organised by the lovely Rachel over at Rachel's Random Resources?

What I Did During Lockdown

If you've read the recent blog post I wrote for Juliet Greenwood you'll already know how I spent lockdown - and it didn't involve baking banana bread! Cooking, cleaning, and food shopping for a houseful of people (like every one else!) didn't leave much time for writing but I've finished the edits for my most recent book You Make it Feel Like Christmas and I'm now a third of the way into a sequel to Trust Me I Lie. (You can read more about these books here).

One thing that helped keep me sane during lockdown was my evening walks with my family. We were lucky enough move to a village on the Wales/Cheshire border two years ago but hadn't had the time to explore. Unable to go further than five miles from our home, we now had plenty of opportunity to explore!

We started by checking out the footpaths we knew about. They often led to the strangest places. Some we hadn't even known existed. I thought this path would take us to the local school, instead it was a back route into the churchyard, complete with fairy tale lychgate.

Although we knew the church was there, we hadn't appreciated how huge the graveyard was or how old some of the graves were.

We found the grave of a soldier who survived the Charge of the Light Brigade (living to be 88!), a row of war graves commemorating the pilots who died during training at the local airfield, and lots and lots of bluebells.

I got into the habit of taking my phone with me. I tried to take a photo each day and post it on Instagram. I went through a phase of taking moody shots of sunsets through trees

and found that by playing around with camera angles, I could make them look gothic.

We chose a different walk each evening and, as we became fitter, joined the walks together until we were doing a two-mile walk every evening. My favourite (obviously) was to the local castle.

Because there were hardly any people or traffic about, we saw a lot more of the local wildlife

and discovered a pond where we got to know all the geese (Canada and Greylag) and watched their offspring grow up. (This is why my Instagram feed was full of blurry photos of goslings.)

It turns out that our village is almost entirely surrounded by farmland and is one of the few places in this area that grows barley. (Yes, I did have to Google that. I'm such a city girl I had to Google that it was barley!)

As well as the goslings, we found lambs (who wouldn't stay still long enough for me to focus the camera) 

and curious cows who were happy to pose.

With the change in the weather, I'm still walking but taking less photos. There are only so many pictures of grey skies and blurry goslings that anyone wants to see! I've walked every footpath around my village (once accidentally ending up back at my house when I thought I was going somewhere else). I've learnt all the history and watched the goslings grow up - and fly away.

I've photographed the spring flowers in the hedgerows (and learnt their names!) and when I look back at my Instagram it's like flicking through a diary - with lots of good times to counteract the bad ones. So I'm going to keep walking, taking photos, and enjoying nature, and every day being thankful and very grateful for all that I have, and all that I was too busy to slow down and appreciate before.

How I Found the 'Write' Inspiration

Have you ever read a book that you loved so much, that as soon as you finished it you had to go right back to the start and read it all over again? Have you ever read a book so many times that it eventually fell to bits? And when you went to buy a replacement, although the book had been reprinted several times, you had to have the version with the exact same cover as the one that had disintegrated? Reading a book just like that led to me becoming a writer.

I was 13 years old and on a family holiday to the Isle of Wight. It was the height of summer, so it rained and it rained and it rained. While my brothers disappeared off to the amusement arcade, I found myself in a little café/bookshop on my own, sat next to a carousel stacked with books by an author I’d never heard of: Jilly Cooper.

I know what you’re thinking: Jilly Cooper writes huge, glitzy, blockbusting novels about horses. But before Riders and Rivals, Jilly wrote a series of romantic comedies with girl’s names as the titles: Emily, Bella, Harriet, Prudence, Octavia and Imogen.

I handed over my pocket money in exchange for Emily and was soon transported to Scotland along with the heroine, who finds herself married to a brooding artist, spends the night in a haunted castle and is caught stealing roses in a see-through nightdress. I quickly handed over the remainder of my pocket money for the other five books and my parents didn’t see me for the rest of the holiday.

I think the reason I loved Jilly’s books so much was that they were hugely funny and didn’t take themselves too seriously. The heroines made the same mistakes as the rest of us, but rather than whinge about it they just cracked a joke and moved on. My favourite (the one that fell to bits) was Imogen. The heroine falls in love with a bad boy tennis player and is whisked off on holiday to the French Riviera, which at the time seemed a very long way from a rain-lashed Isle of Wight.

Three years later, for my English Literature exam, I had to give a presentation on my favourite books. My friends (being complete suck-ups) picked authors like Dickens and Orwell. I chose Bella, Octavia and Imogen. Unfortunately, my passion and enthusiasm for all things Cooper failed to impress the examining board and I passed with only a B+.

I didn’t mind. If you’re the kind of person who loves reading, sooner or later you’ll want to create stories of your own.

And that is exactly what I did.

This post was previously published on the Chick Lit Club blog

Links:

If you'd like to find out more about Jilly Cooper, click here for her website.

Related Posts:

Ten Authors Who Influenced Me

Five Books That Influenced Me