Sometimes you don’t realize how lucky you are until you stumble across a website like the “Bad Gift Emporium.” http://www.badgiftemporium.com/  It’s a frightful showcase of bad gifts received by others. As the website says, these “gifts are so bad, they’re good (at being bad).”  Here you can find candy corn mice butter knives; a Llama doll sporting real llama fur (that’s just creepy) and a music box that plays Santa Clause is Coming to Town and features Santa and Mrs. Clause doing the wild thing in a bathtub (even creepier than the llama).     

It’s good for a laugh. But on a more serious note, as we close the book on this final day of 2008, please know that all of us at Sisterhood of the Jaunty Quills wish each of you a very happy, healthy, prosperous 2009.

Happy New Year!

My new baby is out there. Today is release day for Wild, my newest historical romance from Avon.

The setting is 1829, soon after the Regency period. The hero is Anthony Maddox, a young man who was lost in Africa as a child, much earlier in the century, back when explorers were first going into the wild continent. Anthony is the heir to his father’s earldom, but he has to be brought back to England forcibly because he has no interest in leaving his perfect world in Africa.

The heroine is Grace Hawthorne, the companion of Anthony’s grandmother, the dowager countess of Sutton, who took her in when she had nowhere else to go. Grace loves the old countess dearly, and would do anything for her. But when she is given the task of “civilizing” her grandson, Grace is taken aback. She is an exceedingly prim and proper young woman, and does not see how she can possibly make the barbaric man presentable to society. Besides, this is a job that puts her in close contact with Anthony for several hours of every day, a situation Grace can barely abide. Especially since Anthony seems to delight in tormenting and embarrassing Grace with improper talk … and touching.

I hope you will visit my website for an excerpt from Wild. I’ll draw a name from all those who comment here on this excerpt, and the winner will win a free copy of Wild. Good luck!

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

more cat pictures

I love everything about going to movies. I love sitting in the theater and watching the previews. I love munching on a small popcorn…okay, with butter added. I love being enveloped by the surround sound. Most of all I like watching the story unfold.

I must admit that I don’t pay much attention to movie reviews. That’s because I like romantic movies, usually dissed by the reviewers, and movies with a happy ending. I don’t go to movies to be depressed. I go to be entertained and to feel good when I walk out of the theater.

Since I’m somewhat discerning in the movies I see, I can’t remember going to one where I felt disappointed when it was over. So when I saw that Moviefone had come up with their “10 Worst Movies of 2008 list,” I had to check it out.

10. Meet Dave starring Eddie Murphey
9. The Hottie and the Nottie starring Paris Hilton and Christine Lakin
8. 88 Minutes starrring Al Pacino
7. Fool’s Gold starring Matthew McConaughey and Kate Hudson
6. Saw Vee
5. Jumper
4. 10,000 BC
3. Disaster Movie
2. The Love Guru (I saw the previews of this one and thought it looked stupid)
1. The Happening

I’d like to know if you’ve seen any of these movies and if they were really as bad as the review thought. Also– do you have any movies that you think should have been on this list??

Treat yourself to a wonderful Christmas story curtesy of NPR and John Henry Faulk:

This Christmas presented a challenge I’d never faced before: I’m on deadline. Honestly, I’m so grateful to be under contract – especially during this time when so many are out of work – that I haven’t allow myself to grumble (too loudly). Even so, I did wonder how I was going to get everything done without either the writing suffering or leaving everything to the last minute so that I felt pushed and harried about Christmas. So, it was interesting when early on, I happened to hear someone talking about how easy it is to get so caught up in the doing that we lose sight of the meaning of the season. “If that happens,” he said,  “what’s the point? If you’re not decorating the tree and making the cookies with love in your heart why bother?”

The man was a stranger, and I overheard this profound Christmas “message.” But boy, did it hit home. I took those words to heart and decided the best thing I could do when I was tempted to stress was to borrow a page from Julie Andrews and simply remember my favorite things – all the things that make the season The Most Wonderful Time Of The Year. Doing so reminded me of why I love the holidays so much… You know what? It’s turning out to be one of the best Christmases yet.

With that fresh in mind, I’d like to share a few of my favorite thing…

I love how Christmas starts early in our house (though, never until after Thanksgiving). We always buy our tree the Saturday of Thanksgiving weekend. When my husband and I were first married, we waited until Christmas week and ended up with the most pitiful, Charlie Brown tree you’ve ever seen. I guess there was a shortage that year? Who knows, but since then, we’ve always gotten our tree early.

I love unpacking the ornaments and decorations. After my mom passed away, my dad entrusted the family ornaments to me. I cherish the memories each one holds. When I hang the old glass Santa, even though the paint is chipped and worn, his jolly smile takes me back to when I was a kid and my brother and I used to fight over who got to hang him on the tree (it’s a wonder we weren’t both on the naughty list). The newer ornaments acquired since getting married and having a child are starting to tell a nice story of their own. It’s wonderful to rediscover them each year.

I love our nativity scene. My grandmother had it made for my mother, and now I have it. One day I will pass it on to my daughter. I hope the tradition continues for an infinite number of generations.

I love Christmas/holiday music. My husband joked the other day about there being only fifteen standard tunes that everybody and his brother have recorded and the mainstream plays over and over and over. I know that’s not true, because I own the CD “25 Best Loved Christmas Songs” (that I play over and over and over):grin:. No matter how much holiday music I play, I don’t grow tired of it. Come on, it’s only a month, if that. I love the music because different songs remind me of people I love and evoke so many good memories: Silver Bells makes me wistful thinking of my mom. I started crying the other day when I heard, I’ll Be Home For Christmas, because it reminded me of my grandma. Feliz Navidad makes me smile every time I hear it because I remember how my brother re-wrote the chorus in a way that only he could (I won’t torture you with his rendition, but I will tell you it included the words, “Fleas in eggnog.” Enough said.) Let It Snow, What Child Is This, Carol of the Bells, and Jesus, Joy Of Man’s Desiring are some of my personal favorites.

I love watching Miracle On 34^th Street and It’s a Wonderful Life. I never tire of the stories and look forward to them each year.

I love baking. I make so many cookies that often my husband has to take them to work to keep us from lapsing into a sugar-induced coma.

I love getting the shopping done early and wrapping the presents so that we can enjoy the anticipation.

I love my little nutcracker pin, that lives in my jewelry box until the first of December. I love the old-fashioned poinsettia dish and ceramic Santa boots that used to belong to my great grandma. I love the memory of how we used to go for a Christmas Eve drive looking at Christmas lights in our old Sebring convertible. We’d put the top down and bundle up in blankets in the backseat and freeze our noses off, but it was our “sled” and now it is a memory I wouldn’t trade for anything.

I love how this time of year people pause to think about what really matter. It gives me hope that maybe one day there really can be Peace on Earth and good will.

I hope that you’ll take a moment to remember some of your favorite things. If you do, please share them with us.

Here’s wishing you a very merry Christmas!

I just found out that my February release, Tempted into the Tycoon’s Trap, is an RT Top Pick!
I’m super excited! It’s my first top pick and possibly my favorite book I’ve ever written. It’s nice to know I wasn’t delusional.

Every once in a while, you find a new author who is so wonderful, you wonder where her books have been all your life. I feel that way about Candice Hern. This summer I picked up, Lady Be Bad, the third book in her wonderful Merry Widows series.

The series is about five young Regency era widows who pledge to never marry again, but to all take lovers. It was so much fun to read about heroines who weren’t super young. And each of the books was super sexy, without being all about sex, which I just love. I was able to beg and borrow the pervious two (which are no longer available new).
All three of the books were just fabulous. And the forth story in the series was part of the anthology, It Happened One Night. And I just finished reading it the other day. It was my treat for finishing my book. It didn’t disappoint.

But I am a little sad because I don’t think enough people have read these wonderful books. Here’s my Christmas gift to you–telling you about a great author you might not be reading.

So who are your favorite authors that are unsung heros?

Like just about every mom, I have traditions at Christmastime. Most of mine involve baking, and one of the things my kids and I love to do is build a gingerbread house. It’s one of those activities that’s much better in theory than in practice. I imagine melting some Lifesavers for stained glass windows, dusting the roof with powdered sugar, maybe using a little cotton for smoke coming out of the chimney. These happy visions always take place before the reality of the structure is before me. Getting the thing to stand must take precedence over stained glass windows.

This year, the frosting wasn’t stiff enough. The walls had warped in the oven and the structure listed to the left a bit. That was okay. It still looked cute. Before we put on the roof, we made a tiny gingerbread family inside. My son came up with the idea of making a gingerbread Santa and an elf for the roof, a few reindeer shapes. He took on frosting the elf (red, of course) to match the Santa my daughter was working on. All was going well until the roof slid off the house and landed right on my son’s elf.

“Oh, no!” my son cried. “You crushed him!”

“I’m so sorry!” I blurted, picking up the roof. Constructions sites can be so dangerous.

The gingerbread elf lay facedown in a pool of red frosting. “The poor thing,” my son said. “You killed him.”

Keep in mind that we were all sugared up on Christmas cookies and overtired from a day frolicking in the snow. I began laughing at the tragic sight…the type of unstoppable, wheezing laughter that usually occurs (in my family, at any rate) during church. “Very sorry,” I managed to say. Indeed, the elf only  needed a chalk outline to finish his image as the vic.

My son gave me a look, then decided the whole thing was too funny to resist. He picked up a gingebread reindeer, then mimicked it trampling the poor fallen elf.

“Stop,” ordered my tender-hearted daughter, though she was trying not to laugh. “You’re so cruel.”

At this point, I took another reindeer and made it lap up some of the elf’s blood, which made my son laugh so hard he drooled. It was then we noticed the splotch of red on the roof, where the elf’s frosting had smeared. “It looks like Santa stabbed someone,” my daughter commented, and with that, we all laughed so hard our teeth chattered.

Well, our gingerbread house won’t be winning the cover shot of Martha Stewart’s December issues, but heck. We all sat around and made merry while Christmas music played and snow fell outside. Which is, after all, the point.

Any wonderfully horrible holiday disasters you’d like to share? And oh, by the way…happy holidays! See you in 2009!

Kristan

Every year I’m torn when it comes to what kind of Christmas tree to put up. There’s nothing like the smell of a real tree. Just feeling the needles can make me nostalgic for Christmas past. Going to search for one, whether going to a tree farm or to a parking lot decorated with lights and trees of every shape and side can be part of a Christmas tradition.

On the other hand, I love trees and the thought of one being cut down just so I can put it in my house and admire it for several weeks brings a pang to my heart. I know these particular trees are grown for that purpose (just like cows are bred for market) but it still bothers me.

So, every year I bring out my slender fake one:

It fits in perfectly in the space I have, doesn’t drop needles and I don’t have to worry about fire.

But somehow it’s not the same. Still, I’m not sure I’ll ever go to the trouble of buying a real tree.

What about you? Which way do you lean on this issue? Real? Fake? Or don’t you bother with a tree at all?