Welcome to the Holiday Gifts of Love Blog Hop! Over two hundred authors are participating and each of us is offering our own prize, plus there are three grand prizes to be won:
1st Grand Prize: A Kindle Fire or Nook Tablet
2nd Grand Prize: A $200 Amazon or B&N Gift Card
3rd Grand Prize: A Swag Pack that contains paperbacks,
ebooks, 50+ bookmarks, cover flats, magnets,
pens, coffee cozies, and more!
You can link to all the Hop blog posts HERE
How to enter? Leave a comment with your email addy – that’ll enter you for all three grand prizes, as well as for my prize: your choice of one of my two holiday reads, A Gift for Adam and Santa’s Boss.
The hop runs from today through December 17 – winners will be announced on the 18th.
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What are some of your favorite holiday traditions? At our house, I always loved sitting in the living room with just the tree lights on, the marvelous scent of pine (it was always a real tree), Christmas carols playing, and at some point, touring the neighborhood Christmas lights. With any luck (and for probably half the Christmases of my adult life), a blanket of white snow added its reflection to the Christmasy glow.
This year will be a little different for us! Leaving our day jobs to pursue writing and editing full time has given us the opportunity to travel and take our work with us wherever we go. Right now we’re parked in our motorhome outside of Las Vegas, Nevada, in an RV resort, palm trees and all. Just for the record, palm trees were never part of my Christmas tradition! Clearly this year, we’ll need some new traditions.
The tree, for starters. Living in a motorhome, space is at a premium, but we did pack our two-foot fiber optic Christmas tree, and it now sits by the window on our dinette table, where it can be seen from outside. And yes, we have turned off all the lights and watched it glow.
The scent of pine? Not a problem. We don’t burn ordinary candles in such a tight space, but a friend of ours makes artisan soy candles that burn clean and leave no smoky residue. We brought them along, and you can bet there’s one with the perfect blend of Christmas reminders: mistletoe and balsam pine.
Touring the neighborhood Christmas lights? This was a surprise for me – I’ve never spent any December time in an RV resort. I had no clue year-rounders would put up Christmas lights, but they do, and each evening we’ve gone for a walk after dark to enjoy the them. A cute touch on several rigs is Santa hats on the top of each rear view mirror.
Christmas carols – we loaded up our playlists with every Christmas CD in the house before we left: traditional, Classical, Baroque, popular, Celtic, Native American…more hours of music than we’ll probably have time to listen to. No problem.
Snow? Well, the point of being in Nevada instead of the upper Midwest in December is to avoid snow and ice, so I’ll take a pass on the snow, I hope. We can, however, see a dusting of snow on the top of nearby mountain peaks, so I’ll simply hope it stays there and doesn’t creep down into the valley.
We’re loving this opportunity to set our own work schedule, choose where we want to spend our time, and sample places we’ve always wanted to see. We’re spending lots of time writing and will soon have announcements about more new books coming your way for the new year.
Meanwhile, here’s wishing you a marvelous holiday, whatever you celebrate. What are some of your favorite traditions?
