The Word Wenches share their Christmas memories
The wenches … I mean, romance authors at the popular Word Wenches blog got together to put out the Mischief and Mistletoe anthology (through Kensington Publishing). This is the first anthology put together by a blog group. Cool huh?
Here, the wenches … I mean, authors share some of their favorite Christmas memories and a little about the story each contributed to Mischief and Mistletoe. (Bet you'll be looking forward to Christmas after you read this!)
From what I've read, the date of Christmas was pinned to traditional pagan winter solstice celebrations because if people were going to party anyhow, it would be good to connect that to the birth of Jesus. So Christmas has always had a dual nature of religious celebration and pagan partying.
When I was a kid, the pagan part predominated. Oh, I went to Sunday school and sang Christmas carols, which I loved. But I was always wild with excitement on the holiday itself. Getting presents! Giving presents! Time off from school! I was the youngest of three, and we always woke up on Christmas morning in the wee, dark hours so we could rush down to the living room and see the presents piled around the tree. (Not that I believed in Santa — as the youngest, I always knew The Truth about Santa, the Easter Bunny and the Tooth Fairly.)
House rules were that we could take down our stockings when we got up, so we'd carry them off to my sister's bedroom, which was the largest. Tangerines and small gifts must suffice till it was time to open the presents. (And we all had to eat breakfast first!) Since we didn't have a lot of money, presents were opened one at a time so the whole family could appreciate each.
In the afternoon, we'd go to the sprawling house of one of my uncles. The adults would sit around the long kitchen table drinking coffee, eating pie and chatting lazily. The gang of cousins raced around the house like a pack of heathens. There's that pagan side again! And great good fun it was, too.
About her story in M&M, She Stoops to Wenchdom
The heroine of my anthology story, She Stoops to Wenchdom, is no pagan, though! Lucy Richards is a sweet, well-behaved vicar's daughter. But when the young man she's quietly loved for years returns from the wars and barely seems to recognize her, she decides that it's going to take some serious naughtiness to get Gregory Kenmore out of her system!
When I was a child, Christmases were always fun, and always followed the ritual. Part of the ritual was our Christmas tree, and I don't remember ever thinking our Christmas tree was odd. It was a table-top tree, which was quite common, and in fact what Queen Victoria had when she started the tradition, but it was basically a central stick about 4 feet high with some wires coming out for branches. The wires had bits of green stuff twisted onto them. We covered it with decorations and it was just fine.
When my mother died in 1987, we found that old tree in the attic and it went to the dump. A few weeks later I saw an article in the paper about feather trees. Apparently during the war it was impossible to get a Christmas tree and so these were made with wire and chicken feathers dyed green. According to the article, they're quite collectible!
About her story, Miss Brockhurst's Christmas Campaign
I love writing Christmas stories and including the old English traditions when I can. In Miss Brockhurst's Christmas Campaign, Penelope Brockhurst has gained the name Miss Breakheart by jilting three men. Too late she realizes why -- she's in love with her childhood friend Ross Skerries. When she sets off to spend Christmas with the Skerries family, she intends to win him, but when she arrives, he's on the point of engaging to marry a sweet, conventional young lady. What's a wicked wench to do? Break the arrangement and win her man, of course.
As to my own Christmas memory: This one should be the Christmas That Almost Didn't Happen.
I was flying into London to take up work there and looking forward to it tremendously. My son, Doug, was too. He was 5 years old and beyond excited. We'd been living in Africa most of his life and he was greatly impressed by snow. I think he thought Narnia was real and would turn out to be in London.
For reasons that escape me, they'd scheduled me to fly in on Dec. 24. "OK," says I to myself. "I thrive on challenge."
Unfortunately, while my son and I arrived safe and sound in London, my luggage went on holiday elsewhere. The airline people thought it was probably in Karachi. Or maybe New Delhi. They'd find out in a day or two, anyway. After the New Year, at latest.
All my clothing. All my son's clothing. All my lovingly selected and carefully wrapped presents.
"Oh good," I says cheerfully, shivering in the taxi. "We'll get to go shopping first thing."
Turns out drugstores are open on Christmas Eve, so on the way to the apartment that was waiting for us we stopped and bought out the drugstore. We just went wild.
It made a lovely Christmas Eve. I cooked bread pudding, sprinkled with salted nuts. For the Christmas tree ... They had construction paper and little scissors for kids. So we cut strips and glued them into rings and made paper chains. Then I got up on a chair on the table and hung the chains from the ceiling with cellotape.
Highest adventure.
We'd bought Christmas crackers. I had no idea you were supposed to "pop" these. We peeled the wrapping off and unrolled them. I gave Doug a hot water bottle for Christmas and he gave me a Cadbury's candy bar. We were rather oddly dressed. I wore a sort of pink running outfit to bed, I remember.
The next day, Christmas Day, the chief admin officer heard of our plight and invited us over to his house for dinner. We ate Chinese food -- his wife was Chinese -- with chopsticks.
Doug played in the garden with their kids. A wonderful day. And it snowed.
About her story, Intrigue and Mistletoe
For the Mischief and Mistletoe anthology I've written another spy story. I have to stop this or people are going to be convinced I can't write anything else.My Jack and Elinor have A Past, and it's not a happy one. She's wary and aloof. He's determined to win her back. When snow strands them together in a small country inn, they're tossed into intrigue and danger, ferreting out spies and secrets. The underlying story is forgiveness. New beginnings. Letting go of old wrongs. Learning to love again.
Favorite memories are usually emotional ones, not necessarily "I went to England and met the queen" vignettes. One of my tearjerkers was the year my husband proposed. We were poor students, still living with our parents to save money for tuition. And then he received the dreaded draft letter, and we knew he'd be going to war in another year. We didn't want to wait any longer to share our lives, but we didn't have money to spare. So instead of a diamond ring, he gave me the world's best cookbook, because we'd starve otherwise.
About her story, Wench in Wonderland
In my wench story, the hero gifts my heroine with oranges, not because he's poor, but because they are one of her favorite Christmas memories. And for other reasons, but I'll leave the reader to discover those.
Christmas 1997 and I was an aspiring author who had sent my manuscript in to Harlequin Mills & Boon some months before. Just before the holidays I received feedback from the editor with suggested revisions. I was so excited that someone finally wanted to publish my book after 12 years of trying that I worked through the entire Christmas holiday. I remember sitting in the living room at my parents-in-law's house on Christmas Day, typing away with a plate of turkey and all the trimmings balanced on the arm of the chair! Every so often one of the family would come in to see how I was doing, bring me Christmas pudding and pull a cracker with me. They were all fabulous, bringing Christmas to me so that I could fulfill my dream of becoming a writer.
About her story, On a Wicked Winter's Night
My story in the Mischief and Mistletoe anthology is all about love reunited and hope for the future. Lydia Cole has carved out a new life for herself in a little town in Wales far from the London society who threw her out in disgrace. But in running away she has left behind the one man whom she loves. When fate brings them together again, Christmas provides the perfect opportunity for second chances. I always wanted to write an HEA for Lydia. She was a secondary character is a series I wrote a few years ago, The Brides of Fortune, and lots of readers wanted to know what happened to her. I was thrilled that the Word Wench anthology gave me the chance to tell Lydia's story, and thrilled to be published in company with the other Wenches, too!
My mother was Swiss and at Christmastime, we loved to hear stories about the holiday traditions she had while growing up in Europe. (Not to speak of loving to gobble up the special traditional cookies that only got baked once a year!) One of the things we kids found fascinating was that her family's tree had real candles!
Well, one season she came home from a visit to relatives with a box of shiny metal candles clips and announced that this year, we, too, would get to put candles on the tree. As you can imagine, my brothers and I were even more excited about this than we were about Santa Claus. It was a big production to arrange the clips just so among the ornaments, and it was decided that the big lighting ceremony would be held on Christmas Eve. (We did add a string of modern lights as a backup.)
We all gathered around the tree, the matches were struck, the candles were lit -- oh joy! It looked amazing . . . There was just one little thing my mother forgot. In her large extended family, an elderly aunt had always assumed the duty of "candle-watcher," armed with a wet washcloth to put out any errant sparks. Now, of course, we were aware of keeping an eye on open flames. However, in the merriment of the evening, we all got distracted ... until my older brother suddenly sniffed the air and said, "Do I smell something burning?"
Luckily, the tree suffered no real damage, but needless to say, from then on we confined ourselves to modern electricity and our own flaming tree became part of the Christmas memories, which we still laugh about. (I'm glad we did it once!)
About her story, Weathering the Storm
Coming up with the idea for our anthology was almost as much fun as writing the story! Although the eight of us are scattered across multiple countries and multiple time zones, we chat on our private e-mail loop most every day about this and that. In talking about books -- which we do a lot! -- the idea of writing a "Wench" anthology got tossed out. We all laughed ... and then started to say, "Hmmmm."
Trust me, the Wenchly brainstorming sessions to come up with a concept for the book were highly amusing, to say the least! But after all was said and done, we decided on a very simple overall theme -- a Wicked Wench at Christmastime. And then off we went to write our individual stories.
The result is eight individual stories tied together by this one holiday ribbon -- and as a reader I find it delightful that each has its own unique interpretation of "wicked" and reflects the style of its author. (I'm betting those of you familiar with the Wenches will be able to identify the author of each simply by reading a snippet!)
In my story, I chose to create a heroine whose "wickedness" is simply being a headstrong hoyden. She's no proper lady -- which tweaks the perfectly tied cravat of the oh-so proper hero. He believes in order and the rules ... until a chance storm forces them to join forces in a desperate journey to reach London in time for Christmas.
Now, along the way, I actually have the hero do something a little wicked too ... but you'll have to read the story to find out what it is!
I was brought up reading stories about cold, snowy, English Christmases, but coming from Australia, almost every Christmas I've ever had is in summertime, when it's hot. And sometimes REALLY hot.
My family always does the traditional Christmas -- with a real Christmas tree that we cut ourselves, and all the ornaments -- I adore the smell of the house during Christmas. And then there's Christmas dinner. Imagine sitting down to a seafood starter -- prawns and lobster (caught by my grandfather), followed by the big traditional roast dinner -- turkey, pork and baked potato and pumpkin and steamed vegetables, followed by hot Christmas pudding with custard, cream or ice cream (or all three) -- all in 100-degree weather. The kitchen was an inferno, and some years we lived in a house where the stove was wood fired, and it was even hotter. But to have cold meats and salads was somehow unthinkable -- it just wouldn't be Christmas.
So for me, the most special Christmas was the one we had when I was about to turn 9 and we were on our way home to Australia, after a year living in Scotland. We had Christmas in London, with my great aunt and uncle -- he worked in the Australian Embassy -- and it was cold. Proper storybook Christmas cold -- not quite the white Christmas we all craved, but enough flakes of snow to thrill us.
I got a pair of roller skates for Christmas that year, probably because I'd just read Noel Streatfeild's White Boots. My skates weren't boots or even white -- they were those strap-to-your-shoes type, and made to expand with growing feet, but I didn't care. I spent most of that Christmas Day lurching and wobbling around the London footpaths (watching out for AA Milne bears) with an older teenage sister rugged up and following me to pick me up and make sure I didn't get lost. It was utter bliss. A freezing cold Christmas, like all the storybooks said it was, and my first pair of skates.
About her story, The Mistletoe Bride
My story in Mischief and Mistletoe is set in Scotland. In my experience, Scotland wasn't very big on Christmas -- they were much more about Hogmanay (New Year). However, my heroine was English but had grown up in India and so, like me, had always dreamed of a traditional white Christmas. It's a temporary wedding, so this might be her only chance, so she drags my dour Scots hero out in the snow to cut mistletoe with her. Of course, despite the cold, he thaws, and slowly, they fall in love. Only it's supposed to be a temporary wedding ...
Childhood Christmases -- my own and, later, those of my children -- comprise a lovely bundle of memories for me. There were the blithe, silly, happy moments when my sisters and I would wake up before dawn and tiptoe downstairs, whispering and giggling, to find some special gift under a glittering tree. And then there are memories of my own sons, mischievous and disarming as only little boys can be, finding their own gifts under the tree. But of all those Christmases, perhaps the best was when our first son was a tiny newborn -- we were sleepy, distracted, disorganized and very, very happy.
About her story, A Wilder Wench
In the Word Wenches' first Christmas anthology, Mischief and Mistletoe, my own story was lovely fun to write. A Wilder Wench blends Highland whiskey smuggling with a revenue officer and a girl who takes a dangerous risk to help someone she loves. When Edward Armstrong, Lord Dunallan, newly appointed sheriff of a Highland region, meets the local vicar's niece at a supper party, he recognizes the girl he risked his life to protect years before. He also recalls that her father was a notorious smuggler. Cristina Heron-Shaw remembers Dunallan, too, dismayed that he is now sheriff -- for she plans to ride out on that snowy night to stop the coach that carries a document wrongly accusing her brother of smuggling. A night of cross purposes, wild rides, midnight passions, a snowstorm and an old vow -- not to mention a stack of custard pies -- made A Wilder Wench a delightful writing adventure for me, and I hope this little romantic adventure brings some holiday joy to readers.