I love to learn about the Christmas traditions of other cultures. When I married my husband, who is from Ireland, I asked him what uniquely Irish holiday traditions he grew up with. “Well, people got drunk a lot,” he said. We decided to skip that one. Our six children are adopted from various countries, which you’d think would give us a host of ideas for holiday traditions we could incorporate in our own. However, most of their birth cultures do not traditionally celebrate Christmas, and the closest we got was “eating fruit.”
We ended up making our own traditions. Some of them, like cinnamon rolls on Christmas morning, have remained consistent over the years. Others, like my idea to dress everyone formally for Christmas Eve dinner, were quickly abandoned. (I started the tradition as a way to occasionally wear my collection of bridesmaids dresses, but I reckoned without a husband who abhors wearing a suit for any reason—I even had to talk him into wearing one for our wedding!)
I would have loved to mine Jane Austen’s stories for Christmas traditions, but as Christmas was nothing like the major holiday it is now in Regency England, there’s not much to copy. However, I very much enjoyed writing my two Christmas-themed novellas.
“Mistletoe at Thornton Lacy” is in the A Very Austen Christmas anthology. I wrote it because the ending of Mansfield Park is just so devoid of details as to how Fanny and Edmund got engaged. I had fun imagining how it might have come about, and revisiting all my other favorite characters, like Lady Bertram (and pug!), Tom, and Susan.
The other novella is “Kitty’s Christmas,” in the A Very Austen Noel anthology. As someone married to a clergyman, I’ve always been delighted that Kitty eventually married one, too, according to what Jane Austen once told her niece. I love epistolary novels, and I really enjoyed writing one. I had to invent the hero for this one, and I may say that he’s probably the favorite out of all the heroes I’ve ever invented.
The anthologies have a lot of other great authors contributing novellas and are sure to contribute to a festive state of mind!
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