In Which I Share Our Family's Holiday Reading Traditions

I love Advent and Christmas. Advent, for the nonobservant, is a season in the Church calendar that begins four Sundays before Christmas and is meant as a time to prepare your heart and mind for Christmas. Some liturgical Christians are super strict about it and don't put up any Christmas decorations until Christmas Eve, but I'm not an Advent purist. My family and I are observant Christians, but we mix plenty of general cultural Christmas traditions into both our Advent and Christmas traditions. 

One of my favorite things to do when it's time to pull out the Christmas decorations (never until after Thanksgiving, of course) is to bring up the book reindeer from the basement storage closet. These two reindeer were crafted by my father in law's students many decades ago when he taught wood shop in high school. They've suffered some abuse over the years. Both have lost their antlers, but they continue to do their job of holding our Christmas books.  I'm not sure what they were originally intended to hold, but they do a fabulous job of being the bearers of the special books that only come out between the weekend after Thanksgiving and January 6th (that's right, there really are twelve days of Christmas, feel free to keep celebrating after the 25th :)). Our Christmas books have become so great in number over the years that they've spilled out of the reindeer and some are now stored under and leaning against our Christmas book holders. Here's one of our reindeer today. Our Elf on the Shelf, Sam, is even reading a book under the reindeer.

Every night of Advent, after lighting our Advent wreath, saying a prayer, and reading some Bible passages, we read a part of a Christmas themed book. This year's selection is A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens. Some of the other books we've read are pictured below in front of the second reindeer. I'm a particular fan of Santa Claus origin stories, as you can see.

Saint Nicholas Day falls on December 6th, usually during the first week of Advent. This day is observed most often in Germany and the Netherlands, but my husband's family started celebrating St. Nicholas Day during his childhood because they lived in a heavily German area of Wisconsin and my mother didn't want her children to feel left out. We've given Saint Nicholas Day our own twist in our family. The kids put out their shoes the night before, and they are filled with candy, an ornament commemorating the year in some way, and a book. Actually, the books are normally under the shoes, because the average book does not actually fit inside a shoe :). I used to be a stickler at giving Christmassy books, but now I've given up and just give each kid a book I know they'll like. For the 15 year old this year it was the latest book in the Nathan Hale's Hazardous Tales series, which he loves. For the 9 year old, it was a new graphic novel, Twins, by Varian Johnson and Shannon Wright.  The kids also receive a book and a new pajamas on Christmas Eve, but I don't have a representative picture of that.

Finally, I have a personal reading tradition every December. About ten years ago I discovered the book Kringle by Tony Abbot. It's a Santa Claus origin story told though the medium of an epic fantasy, and it's amazing. I loved it so much, I bought a copy and read it every year sometime in December. It made it into the Advent family reading a few years ago, but my silly children don't want to hear a book more than once, so I normally have to read it on my own. The good news is, I can then read it at my own pace and don't have to stick to a chapter or two a day.

The book I'm querying right now has a Christmas theme. If it gets picked up by an agent or an editor someday, it may have to be our Advent book the year it comes out. Perhaps it will also brighten another family's December. I can hope, anyway.

One final note: I definitely don't think family readings during December need to be confined to families who celebrate Christmas. There are plenty of great Hannukah books, as well as a few for other holidays and a lot of fun winter stories. Cuddle together with your kids on a cold night (or pretend it's cold if you live in a warm climate and/or the Southern Hemisphere :)) and build some December reading traditions.

In Which I Extol the Value of Connecting with Other Writers

 Whether writing is your full time profession, your side gig, or the hobby your pursue in your few snippets of spare time that you really wish you had more time for, it can be a very lonely pursuit. Your actual creating takes place when you're alone in your office, or on the bed or couch with your laptop, or wherever you create. A rare writer might make use of some kind of community office space, but, as a general rule, there's no office filled with people to go into when you're a writer.

That's why it's so important to connect with other writers. Where would I find these writers, you ask? Why, social media, of course. Social media can be a minefield for a writer. There's conflicting advice all over the place, there are published writers making you feel like you'll never be as good as they are, there are all kinds of shiny, fun things to distract you from actually, you know, writing. However, it can also be a gold mine for meeting other writers you connect with. In my experience, the best way to do that is participate in contests, pitch events, and other writing an pitching opportunities available.

I met my first writing friends a year ago when I signed up for a workshop with Kathy Ver Eecke from getabookdeal101.com about perfecting the perfect pitch for a twitter pitch party. I didn't even end up pitching a book that month. I decided my manuscript wasn't ready. However, what did happen was that another woman who writes book for kids asked if any other children's writers would be open to forming a critique group over Facebook. I said I was interested, and, through that group, met three other writers who have been invaluable companions along the path, serving sometimes as beta readers and sometimes as more in depth critique partners. One has since moved to writing for adults, but we still have a lot to give each other.

My second, and even more amazing, find, happened when I applied to Pitch Wars this year. Pitch Wars pairs up writers with mentors who work with them to perfect their manuscript over a few months and ends with an agent showcase. Many, many times more people apply than are accepted for memberships, but there's a lot of buzz about it on Twitter during the application process, and it's pretty easy to spot other writers who are participating in your genre. I was invited into a message group of writers who had submitted middle grade manuscripts, and it was there that I really feel I found "my people". We've since moved most of our conversations over the Slack, but it remains an amazing, diverse group of people with whom I can be totally honest about issues of writing, questions about how to fairly portray characters who are different from me, and more.

Sometimes, as an aspiring published writer, it's easy to get jealous of the social media relationships you observe between published writers. This isn't always true, but often those relationships developed when the writers were going through the query trenches together. If you look around, you too can find writers in whatever stage you're in and band together to support each other. The #mgwaves have formed a bond, so I'm sorry to say you can't jump in with us, but you can find your own group of waves to catch. They might even cheer you on when you buy an ornament to represent your latest book.