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)

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

A Very Marley Christmas...

Christmas for the Marley family starts the night before, when we choose a favourite Christmas movie to watch, usually Elf. When the children were younger, I would read them ‘Twas the Night Before Christmas, and then we’d look out the window to try and see the lights on Father Christmas’s sleigh. We would leave a mince pie out for Father Christmas, and a carrot for his reindeer, and have no trouble persuading the children to go to bed early. Unfortunately they would wake up early too, eager to see what Father Christmas had brought, but now they’re teenagers we get to wake them. I think this is known as ‘payback’.

It snows a lot in Wales...

Because my husband is convinced we’ll be burgled if we leave the presents beneath the tree, he doesn’t put them out until everyone has gone to bed the night before. This means when we come downstairs on Christmas morning, the tree lights are on and it all looks very magical. This is a minor Christmas miracle in itself as fairy lights hate me and I have to buy new ones every year. As we all believe in Father Christmas, including the teenagers (they’re not daft!), we all have Christmas stockings, but we open our main presents after breakfast. While everyone plays with their new ‘toys’, I cook Christmas dinner – accompanied by loud, cheesy Christmas music and a glass of champagne.

Each decoration tells a story...

We have a traditional Christmas dinner, which we always eat at lunchtime – I have no idea why! Afterwards, we force the teenagers to play an old-fashioned board game, usually The Simpson’s version of Cluedo or Scrabble, and then, if they’ve been really good, we allow them to beat us on their new video games.

Four Marleys with three degrees between us, plus one writer -
and this is the best we could come up with...

Of course, Christmas doesn’t always go according to plan. Actually, it hardly ever goes according to plan, but the most disastrous one was when we were snowed in. I’d ordered all the presents online as well as the Christmas groceries to be delivered – and nothing arrived! It was Christmas Eve before the roads had cleared enough for us to inch our way to the nearest supermarket, fill a trolley and skid back home.

Yes, that's me. On a sledge.

 Strangely enough, that Christmas turned out to be our best one ever. Instead of a ‘traditional’ Christmas, we built snowmen and went sledging – and I made a start on writing a snow-themed story that turned into Something Wicked...

This post previously appeared on Becca's Books

Related Posts:

How Grandma Invented my Family's Christmas

December Update

Here's what I've been up to this month ... 

Guest Blog Posts

A Christmas Gift

for Novelistas Ink

Which book would I give for Christmas?

A Very Marley Christmas

for Becca's Books

How my family and I spend Christmas Day - and how the worst Christmas ever turned into the best one!

Agi and Suze's Christmas Quiz

for Suze Likes, Loves, Finds and Dreams &
Agi's On My Bookshelf

Did you know I'm engaged to Santa Claus? What my favourite Christmas song is? Favourite Christmas movie? Favourite Christmas book?!! Obviously, I couldn't pick just one ...

Book Launch

and Novelistas Ink Christmas Party

The Novelistas had another double celebration this month - it was the book launch for Anne Bennett's family saga, Another Man's Child, and also our Christmas Party!

Anne Bennett with her new book
Another Man's Child

Valerie-Anne Baglietto (left!) and me!
(photo copyright: Trisha Ashley)

Free Books!

This month's book promotion is A Girl's Best Friend. It will be free to download from 27th December 2015 to 31st December 2015.

Amazon UK

Amazon USA

(Details of all current and upcoming book promotions are always listed on my Freebies and Price Promotions page).

Related Posts:

A Girl's Best Friend: How I became a writer and the inspiration behind the book
November Update

Never miss a post! See that little box in the left-hand column, near the top, that says 'Follow by Email'? If you add your email address, you'll receive my latest blog post almost as soon as I've written it.

How Grandma Invented My Family Christmas

My family owe most of our Christmas traditions to my grandmother, who absolutely loved Christmas, even though she had every reason to hate it. She grew up in extreme poverty and her husband was killed two weeks before Christmas, leaving her with a three-year-old daughter (my mother). Instead, she absolutely embraced Christmas and we still carry on many of the traditions she started.

I grew up in a rambling old house with my parents, my grandmother, two younger brothers and several assorted dogs, cats, rabbits and guinea pigs. My grandmother would make our Christmas decorations by disappearing off into the nearby woods and coming back with bags of all kinds of evergreen foliage, including the ubiquitous holly and ivy. (I think there’s a law against this now; there probably was then). She would outline the leaves in glue, and dunk them in glitter, and then use them to cover the mantelpieces and the tops of the pictures hanging on the wall. And, while infuriating my mother by leaving trails of glitter throughout the house, she would tell us stories about the old Norse gods and explain why we decorate our houses with evergreens at this time of year.

We always had a real Christmas tree, which had to be so big it wouldn’t fit in the sitting room; so we’d have to bend over the top, meaning the fairy spent most of Christmas hanging upside down. Every year my mother would try to find new ways to keep the tree alive, including spraying it with various ‘miracle’ concoctions. In the end, she settled for shoving the tree in a large bucket of water, but every time the dogs pushed past it, wagging their tails, a shower of pine needles would hit the floor and the tree would be bald by Boxing Day. All the Christmas baubles had been bought individually, some dated right back to the 1940s, and each had its own little story to tell.

My mother began our tradition of Christmas stockings, mainly (she admitted to me later) to get a little bit longer in bed on Christmas morning. She and my grandmother would make three Christmas puddings – one for Christmas Day, one for Boxing Day and one for New Year – but my mother refused to hide money inside them, because she thought it was unhygienic. My grandmother got around this by boiling the coins, wrapping them in paper and sneaking them onto our plates when my mother wasn’t looking. We were allowed to unwrap one present in the morning, before heading off to church, and the rest of the presents would be opened after listening to the Queen’s Speech.

I never questioned any of these traditions until I left home and had a family of my own. I could hardly raid the local woods for holly, so I bought it from the local garden centre instead. Sadly the berries turned out to be plastic and tied on. The mistletoe had been imported from France and was a strange yellow colour and, as soon as I got it home, all the berries dropped off! So that was one tradition which didn’t last long! Because my mother had never let me near fairy lights in case I electrocuted myself (some of them were pre-war, so she probably had a point), I had no idea how to decorate a tree (I still don’t) but I did carry on the tradition of buying each Christmas bauble individually so it has a story to tell.

My husband laughed when I suggested we make our children wait until after the Queen’s speech to open their presents, and we ended up with an artificial Christmas tree after realising my six-month-old daughter, who had just begun to crawl, would end up stabbing herself on the shrivelled-up pine needles. And no one likes Christmas pudding, so now we make mince pies instead.

So I guess that's what Christmas traditions are all about. You keep some, you adapt others and finally you create new ones to suit your own family.

Now, where’s that glitter …

This post was previously published on the Novelistas Ink blog.

Never miss a post! See that little box in the left-hand column, near the top, that says 'Follow by Email'? If you add your email address, you'll receive my latest blog post almost as soon as I've written it.

Related Posts:

Let It Snow  
Tales of Smugglers and Seaweed
Things That Go Bump

Marley's Marvellous Mincepies

Yes, I can I cook! Are you surprised? My family don't much care for Christmas pudding or Christmas cake, but they do like mince pies! Now, most people either buy mince pies or, if they do make their own, at least buy the mincemeat. I do it the other way around! So here's my recipe for mincemeat. It makes 3lb (1.5kg) of mincemeat and takes about half an hour in total to cook.

 

** If you don't intend to use the mincemeat right away, you'll need to freeze it as there is not enough sugar in the recipe to preserve it! **

Ingredients:

 

1lb (450g) cooking apples

4 tbs dry sherry

1 tsp ground cinnamon

A pinch of ground allspice

14oz (350g) mixed dried fruit (to include raisins, sultanas, currants and dried chopped peel)

2oz (50g) soft brown sugar

Method:

 

Peel, core and dice apples. Put them in a large casserole dish with the sherry, 5tbs of water, cinnamon and allspice. Stir, cover with lid and cook in a microwave for 5 minutes on high power (800w microwave).

 

Stir, add the dried fruit and sugar, and cook on high power for another 4 minutes. Stir again and cook for a further 3 to 4 minutes. The apples should be cooked and the fruit should have soaked up most of the liquid without being too soggy. Allow to cool before using.

 

Enjoy!