Christmas Reading Treasures

DEBORAH CROMBIE: One of my favorite traditions of the holidays is getting out my well-loved Christmas books. Some of them are quite bedraggled! Look at this much-patched copy of Clement C. Moore's THE NIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, illustrated by Arthur Rackham. Other than the dust jacket, the book is in beautiful condition.

And the book plate, with my maiden name in my still loopy schoolgirl handwriting!

Or how about A CHRISTMAS CAROL, 1961 edition, illustrated by Ronald Searle? This one is stamped inside with my parents' name and address.

And this is a replacement copy of my decades old paperback copy of Dylan Thomas's A CHILD'S CHRISTMAS IN WALES, illustrated with woodcuts by Ellen Raskin. I still have the tattered original, and I have different, newer editions, but none of them have quite the same charm.

There is also a 1984 edition of THE NUTCRACKER illustrated by Maurice Sendak!

Aren't these illustrations fabulous??

But most treasured of all is my copy of the Christmas story published in 1973 by my late uncle, A.C. Greene, A CHRISTMAS TREE, illustrated by the painter Ancel E. Nunn, who was his great friend. It's about his childhood Christmases in west Texas, and one particular year when the Christmas tree didn't quite fit. If ever you can find a copy, snap it up!

Unfortunately, the book was at one time shelved on a lower shelf in one of our bookcases and some puppy or other, I don't remember which one was the culprit, chewed a corner quite thoroughly.

Now the book is kept safely stowed on a top shelf!

All of these have pride of place on our coffee table for the season, just waiting to be read. The only problem is finding the time to sit down and enjoy them!

Dear REDs and readers, do you have treasured Christmas books? And which is your favorite?

Paula Munier--The Snow Lies Deep

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I adore Paula Munier's Mercy Carr books when they are set any time of the year, but Christmas, and Christmas in snowy Vermont, is the icing on the Buche de Noel!! And if a new adventure featuring Mercy and Troy with their search and rescue dogs Elvis and Susie doesn't get you in the mood to curl up by the fire with a cup of hot chocolate, Paula has a few more suggestions to get you in the mood!

Winter Solstice

Paula Munier

“You can’t get too much winter in the winter.”

 — Robert Frost

Winter is my favorite season. I love everything about it: the snow, the soup, and most important, reading and writing snuggled up with a cat and a dog (or two or three or four) by the fire. That’s why, for me, the Winter Solstice is a very important holiday.

So important that in my latest Mercy Carr mystery, THE SNOW LIES DEEP, the Winter Solstice plays a big role, as do the Druids who observe the longest night of the year in a grand way in this story. And while I’m no Druid—fond as I am of trees—I do honor the solstice in my own way. I thought I’d share some of those ways with you.

Some of these may seem surprisingly familiar to you, since the winter solstice was the precursor to many of our modern-day holiday traditions. Pagan peoples of old welcomed the turning point that was the winter solstice, with its promise of longer, warmer, more sunlit days to come. They celebrated the return of the sun by burning Yule logs, lighting bonfires, decorating with evergreens and mistletoe, singing and drumming and feasting. I know, very familiar, right? 

Perhaps we are all pagans at heart. But no matter what your tradition or how you typically celebrate this time of year—Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, New Year’s, etc.—you might enjoy incorporating some of these Winter Solstice customs into your holiday season this year (if you don’t already):

        Go for the Light. The winter solstice is all about the light in the darkness, so anything that represents that light is apropos:

                 --Yule log. Burn a Yule log in your fireplace or outdoor fire pit for the twelve days between the Winter Solstice and New Year’s as is the tradition—or whenever you wish. The kind of log is up to you: The English Druids use oak, the Scottish Druids prefer birch, and the French Druids like cherry, with a little wine sprinkled on top because, well, they’re French.

                 --Bonfire. Traditionally, bonfires were lit from sunset to sunrise on the night of the Winter Solstice to welcome the sun. you can burn yours—safely—any time. All you need is wood, family and friends, and maybe a guitar. I’m just saying.

                --Ice Lantern. Lanterns of any kind are good ways to honor the solstice, but if you’re looking for a fun crafty activity to do with your kids or grandkids, making ice lanterns fits the bill. There are a number of how-tos on YouTube; researching different methods is half the fun. Note: If you live where it’s warm in the winter, you can freeze the water in your freezer in plastic tubs. Let there be light!

                --Candles. Advent candles, Menorah candles, Kinara candles…whatever warms your heart and soul. Any and all candles brighten the gloom on a winter’s day. Enjoy!

        

        Mistletoe. If you’ve never hung mistletoe, now’s the time. Mistletoe has always been sacred to the Druids because it grows on trees—and even while trees go dormant in the winter, mistletoe does not. Its host trees are “dead,” but the parasitic plant grows on, despite the cold and lack of sunlight. We’re talking a symbol of fertility here. Which leads us to kissing. Kissing is good.

        Evergreen. Wreaths, garlands, centerpieces—however you decorate with pine or spruce or fir, you’re participating in an age-old tradition that honors the trees that survive the winter with strength and resilience and vibrancy. Go for it! 

        Nature Tree. Adorn a living pine or spruce or fir in your garden or the nearby woods with unsalted popcorn, fresh cranberries, and dried fruit. Be sure to use sturdy string, and do not use fishing line, which can harm birds. Note: If you live in bear country, skip this—and stick to planting native plants that attract birds and other pollinators.

        Bûche De Noël. This is the traditional Yule log dessert. Mercy Carr’s grandmother Patience bakes one in THE SNOW LIES DEEP—a homemade chocolate sponge cake with cocoa hazelnut whipped cream rolled it into a log, with a chocolate ganache icing topped with fresh sprigs of rosemary and sugared cranberries. Not exactly easy, but here’s a recipe from the kitchn that tries to streamline the process.

What are your holiday traditions that echo back to the Winter Solstice? Let’s chat about it here on Jungle Reds! Here’s to a lovely holiday season for us all—and the coming of the light!

 

The seventh Mercy Carr Mystery in which Mercy and Elvis must track down who’s killing the Santas of Northshire’s Solstice Soirée before another St. Nick goes up in the flames of a burning Yule log….

It’s December in Vermont—and Mercy is determined to give her baby Felicity the very best first Christmas ever. Starting with a visit to see Santa at Northshire’s annual Solstice Soirée. But when Santa abandons his post and runs into the woods, Mercy and Elvis go after him—and the shepherd finds the jolly old elf flat on his back in a small clearing, dead, a Yule log ablaze on his belly.

 

Mercy wants nothing more than to stay at home at Grackle Tree Farm taking care of Felicity, but as this St. Nick is really “Uncle” Lazlo, her family presses her to help solve their old friend’s murder and save the Solstice Soirée. She demures, but when another Santa ends up dead and the bones of a long-missing trapper turn up in the woods, Mercy and Troy and the dogs team up with Thrasher and Harrington to rid Northshire of the bad elements ruining the holidays for their town and their family.

 

Together they chase down clues leading to poachers and endangered lynx, evangelical zealots and Russian emigrés, and the terrible secrets haunting the village, past, present, and future. It’s not just Santa at risk, it’s everyone in town—including baby Felicity. It’s up to Mercy and Troy and the dogs capture The Yuletide Killer before he strikes again, this time far closer to home.

 

 

PAULA MUNIER is the Senior Agent and Director of Storytelling for Talcott Notch Literary and the  USA TODAY bestselling author of the Mercy Carr mysteries. A Borrowing of Bones, the first in the series, was nominated for the Mary Higgins Clark Award and named the Dogwise Book of the Year. Blind Search also won a Dogwise Award. The Hiding Place and The Wedding Plot both appeared on several “Best Of” lists. Home at Night was named Library Journal’s Mystery Pick of the Month. The Night Woods, the sixth book in the series, earned a starred Library Journal review among other acclaim. THE SNOW LIES DEEP debuts in December 2025. Along with her love of nature, Paula credits the hero dogs of Mission K9 Rescue, her own rescue animals, and a deep affection for New England as her series’ major influences. She’s also written three popular books on writing: Plot Perfect, The Writer’s Guide to Beginnings, and Writing with Quiet Hands, as well as Happier Every Day and the memoir Fixing Freddie: The True Story of a Boy, a Mom, and a Very, Very Bad Beagle. She lives in New England with her family and four rescue dogs and Ursula The Cat, a rescue torbie tabby who does not think much of the dogs. For more, check out www.paulamunier.com.

DEBS: Paula, I thought you might get a kick out my daughter's Instagram post on Monday!

Because of course she is a big fan, too!

 

 

Connie Berry--A Grave Deception

DEBORAH CROMBIE: I have been huge fan of Connie Berry's Kate Hamilton books since the first one, and now with A GRAVE DECEPTION we have SIX! And, look, there is a quote from Hank on the cover!!!! I'm jealous that Hank got to read this one first, because this plot sounds amazing. Here's Connie to fill us in!

Inspiration: Finding Plot Ideas Hiding in Plain Sight

by Connie Berry

Thank you for inviting me! Today A Grave Deception, the sixth full-length novel in the Kate Hamilton Mystery series, makes its debut in the world. I’m excited and a bit nervous. After more than a year of thinking, developing characters, sketching out plots and subplots, slogging through a first (hideous) draft, and then shaping that unruly blob into a novel, my book must make its own way in the world. I hope my loyal readers will love it, and I hope the book will be discovered by new readers as well.

I’ve been thinking about how that happens—how books find readers. Every series has its own distinctive vibe, its own world populated by characters we hope readers will care about. The Kate Hamilton books are traditional amateur sleuth mysteries set in the British Isles in the world of antiques and antiquities. The focus isn’t on the objects themselves, however. The precious artefacts Kate deals with are literal time travelers, born in another age but surviving for decades, centuries, millennia. I use them as metaphors or launching pads for plots exploring the impact of the past on life today.

I’m often asked where my plots come from. Are they inspired by real events or real people in history? The answer is yes. Every book I’ve written began with something I’d read about, a place I’d seen, or people I’d heard about: What if something like that happened to Kate? How might she get involved? If I’m intrigued, chances are my readers will be, too.

The first novel in my series, A Dream of Death, for example, was inspired by a tale I heard in Vermont years ago while researching an article I wrote for a scholarly journal. In the 1740s, a young woman perished when her horse-drawn sleigh went through the ice on Lake Champlain. It was nighttime. It was March. What was she doing out there alone? Didn’t she know the ice was unstable? Was she fleeing from someone? I moved the setting from Vermont to the Scottish Hebrides, and the story took off in my mind. Since one of my plotlines was set in the 1740s, I brought in Bonnie Prince Charlie and placed my modern story on a fictional island in the Inner Hebrides that refused to let “The Great Hope” die.

Book Four, The Shadow of Memory, was born when I heard a story on NPR’s This American Life about a group of young teenagers who explored an abandoned house in New Hampshire one summer. Who were the people who’d lived in that house, and why had they left everything behind, including clothes, wallets and eyeglasses? It felt creepy. What if those teenagers had stumbled upon something nefarious, something that put their lives in danger? At the time, I was also reading Bill Bryson’s The Road to Little Dribbling and was fascinated by his stint as an aide in a Victorian mental hospital now being converted into luxury apartments. What if the abandoned house had belonged to one of the psychiatrists? What if traces of blood could still be seen on the wooden floorboards?

My new book, A Grave Deception, is based on the discovery in Cumbria in 1981 of a fourteenth-century body so miraculously preserved that archaeologists thought at first they’d discovered a modern murder mystery. The body has since been identified as a knight killed in the crusades in Lithuania and shipped back to Britain for burial. The lead coffin and the methods used to preserve the body turned out to be so effective, liquid blood was found in the man’s chest cavity. What if a medieval body was found in Suffolk, in archaeological excavations in an abandoned plague village—this time of a woman murdered when she was about to give birth? Kate and her colleague Ivor Tweedy might be called in to appraise the grave goods. But then what if another body was found in the excavations—one of the archaeologists?

Plot ideas begin as a single seed that takes root in an author’s brain where it begins to grow and multiply and mature. And these seeds are scattered everywhere. Prolific author Anthony Horowitz said:

There isn’t a single thing in the world that doesn’t have a story attached to it, and all you have to do is ask the right questions. An example: there’s a black telephone box outside my house that’s never actually had a telephone installed. What’s it doing there? Who paid for it? This could be the beginning of a sci-fi novel (it’s a portal to another university [sic]), a spy story (it’s an MI6 dead letter box) or a satire (it’s a costly mistake by an incompetent council… possibly true). [“Five Things Anthony Horowitz Can Teach You About Writing,” https://www.writingcoooperative.com, Oct 13, 2017].

Where in your world might you find the seed of your next plot? That seed could be as simple as a city bus running ahead of schedule or as enigmatic as a gravestone with a disturbing epitaph. It could be as innocent as a child’s imaginary friend or as chilling as a mummified body found in Disney World’s Haunted Mansion.

I hope you enjoy Kate’s adventures in medieval archaeology and murder.

DEBS: Here's more about A GRAVE DECEPTION:

American antiques dealer Kate Hamilton and her husband, Detective Chief Inspector Tom Mallory, have settled into married life in Long Barston. When archaeologists excavating the ruins of a nearby plague village discover the miraculously preserved body of a fourteenth-century woman, Kate and her colleague Ivor Tweedy are asked to appraise the grave goods, including a valuable pearl. When tests reveal the woman was pregnant and murdered, the owner of the estate on which the body was found, an amateur historian, asks Kate to identify the woman and, if possible, her killer. Surprised, Kate agrees to try.

Meanwhile, tensions within the archaeology team erupt when the body of the lead archaeologist turns up dead at the dig site with fake pearls in his mouth and stomach. Then a third body is found in the excavations.

With the help of 700-year-old documents and the unpublished research of a deceased historian, Kate must piece together the past before the grave count reaches four.

And more about Connie!

Connie Berry, unashamed Anglophile and self-confessed history nerd, is the author of the USA Today best-selling and multi-award-nominated Kate Hamilton Mysteries, set in the UK and featuring an American antiques dealer with a gift for solving crimes. Like her protagonist, Connie was raised by antiques dealers who instilled in her a passion for history, fine art, and travel. During college she studied at the University of Freiburg in Germany and St. Clare’s College, Oxford, where she fell under the spell of the British Isles.

Connie is a member of the Crime Writers Association (UK), the Authors’ Guild, Mystery Writers of America, Sisters in Crime, Buckeye Crime Writers, and Guppies, of which she is the immediate past president. Connie lives in Ohio and northern Wisconsin with her husband and adorable Shih Tzu, Emmie. Her latest novel, A Grave Deception, is available at fine bookstores everywhere. You can sign up for her very entertaining monthly newsletter at www.connieberry.com.