Advent Blog Tour, '08 edition

I've participated in one other advent blog tour, waaay back in 2006, click here to read that post. This year's your is jointly hosted by Marg, link to her blog in the title above, and also by Kailana of The Written World and Historical Tapestry. If this is your first time here, welcome. Stay a while. Look around some. It's harder to figure out what to say this year, I think. The economy is way down and people's troubles are up, yet for me Christmastide has never had anything to do with getting more "stuff". Yes, I love to buy gifts for my loved ones and I have some Christmas collectibles I look for. Primarily though, I associate November and December with family related activities.

When I was little advent family activities often meant sleigh rides, tobagganing, snow forts and walks along snow covered lanes gilt with moonlight. Untangling endless strings of Christmas lights. Fittings of Christmas dresses my mother would sew for us. Now I'm the one doing the organizing, and living in the south makes the activities different, but November and December are always similar: getting out the advent wreath & checking the candles, until recently I bought the kids advent calendars, cooking together, helping the needy somehow, family gatherings, climbing into the attic to pull down boxes of Christmas decorations. Well, that last one is now someone else's job. Decorating indoors and out, watching endless holiday related specials, planning the schedule of who visits whom & when. Buying and writing Christmas cards.


Under the Kissing Bough; Shannon Donnelly Traditional Regency

Dark Celebration; Christine Feehan Paranormal- vampire

Under the Mistletoe; Mary Balogh Traditional Regency anthology

A Christmas Kiss; Elizabeth Mansfield Traditional Regency

Winter Wonderland; Elizabeth Mansfield Traditional Regency

This winter season I wish you joy and contentment and good books and good friends and enough of the necessities to get by.

2 Traditional Regencies

I've always loved traditional Regencies and Christmas stories- this fat volume combines 2 Elizabeth Mansfield stories. One is A Christmas Kiss, originally published in 1978 and the other Winter Wonderland originally published in 1993. I sat on my keister for a whole afternoon and read them- no housework, no errands, no chauffering. Just sat and read, something I've not done since before I went to work.

The first one, A Christmas Kiss, unfolds as both a misunderstanding, not the famous 'big mis' some novels are known for and a device I dislike, and as a May-December governess romance. House parties. Jealous wanna be wives on patrol for a rich husband. Loving siblings. Snow storms. I never knew it snowed so much in England.

The second one, Winter Wonderland used a plot device that has worked in the past, but not in this instance. In this case the male lead was horribly emotionally scarred by a single encounter with the heroine at his first ever ball at the tender age of 19. I finished it, but it never really clicked with me. I found myself picking it apart, and that's always a bad sign.