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

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