Christmas, the Musical! (Or, How I Learned to Work with My Inner Grinch)

The Pens are thrilled to welcome guest blogger Jami Alden! Jami Alden is the author of sexy romantic suspense. Her next book, BEG FOR MERCY
will be available in June from Grand Central Press. She lives in the San Francisco Bay Area with her socially well adjusted alpha male husband, her sons, and a german shepherd who patiently listens to dialog and help her work out plot points. You can find out more about Jami and her books at www.JamiAlden.com, www.facebook.com/jamialden, or by following her on Twitter @jamialden.



When I was little the holidays were an awesome time, full of tree decorating, cookie making, and most importantly, vacation from school.

It wasn't until I was older – my late twenties, in fact, that I realized what a freaking production Christmas is. By that time, I'd handled Thanksgiving on my own for several years – I had the turkey, the mashed potatoes, the gravy, the whole package down to a science, and had even managed to get the entire meal, appropriately hot or cool to the table more or less on schedule.

Then, a few years after my husband and I got married, we hosted Christmas for the first time. My in laws (including husband's 7 siblings) were flying in and staying through the new year. I scoured the stores for gifts for the whole group and had them wrapped and ready to go well before the big day. Excited at the prospect of “our” first Christmas, my husband and I went out in search of a tree. Only problem: no lights, no ornaments, no nothing.

No problem! I dutifully went to Target and got enough stuff to deck two trees worth.

Then, tree appropriately twinkling, I looked around the rest of our little rented house and realized... it was bare.

Now, in my house we jokingly refer to my mom as “Patty Christmas.” Every year, she not only does the tree, she also swaps out all the towels for holiday themed linens and gets out all the Christmas themed drinkware. From December 1 – 31st, from your first sip of coffee to your last sip of wine, you are reminded 'tis the season. There are red velvet bows on nearly every doorknob and a faux pine garland winding up the staircase.

My house, in comparison, was sparse, minimalistic even. It wouldn't do. So, having no job or children at the time, I put aside my not yet off the ground writing career and did another wave of Christmas shopping. Candlesticks, towels, glassware, candles, vases in the shape of Santa's boots. I was set. No way Christmas would ever get me down again.

Fast forward 5 years. Let me tell you, nothing brings out my inner grinch like a crushing deadline. Add in 2 kids ages 2 and 5 months, about a thousand people to shop for a and a husband who worked 80 hours a week, and I was ready to cancel Christmas.

We managed to get a tree. It stood in its stand for a week while I circled it resentfully. “I am so not in the mood to decorate you.”

“This sucks!” I muttered. “It's all a bunch of BS and it's not like I don't have enough going on. F the tree. The kids won't give a crap, and they'll break the ornaments anyway.”

Someone must have been listening. Because one Saturday in December while I was out, no doubt doing something very self indulgent like going to Trader Joe's ALL BY MYSELF, some little Christmas Elves came to visit.

When I returned, the tree was decorated. The little holiday knick knacks were strewn around the house. Holy crap, who knew Christmas could happen in our house without me?

The little twinge of guilt I felt at having been such a scrooge disappeared in the wave of love and gratitude for my husband, for seeing that I needed a little help getting into the Christmas spirit, for taking a bunch of stuff off my plate, and doing it all without acting like it was a big deal or a burden or an imposition.

My own Alpha Christmas Elf :)

Do you ever need help getting into the Holiday spirit? Who are your helpers? Are you sad to season end or, like me, do you feel like you'll need the next 12 months to gear up for the next one?

Pass the Grog

by Gigi

I'm a celebrator. Just to be clear: not the kind with a party hat and noisemaker, screaming at the top of her lungs at the strike of midnight on new year's eve. Can you see me doing that? I didn't think so. I'm the kind who seizes an opportunity to let myself celebrate--having fun with a new reason to enjoy life, enticing those around me to join in, then siting back with a smile on my face to take it all in.

When the Pens came over to my house for dinner a few months ago, we hadn't gotten together as a group in a while, so I wanted to do something a little special. Since we conceived of this enterprise as a "Grog" (group blog) I designed a Pens Fatales label for some Grog for us to imbibe that evening. (OK, it was vodka, since who really wants to drink Grog?) It made the whole thing seem more festive. More like a celebration.

A small experience sticks with me that sums up this feeling. On a miserably freezing, wet day, I ducked into The Cafe in the Crypt for a cup of coffee to warm up. The person I was with snagged a table while I waited in line. I returned to the table with not only coffee but also a luscious bread and butter pudding to share. I was soaking wet, and the crypt was more crowded than atmospheric, but I had good company and a warm, buttery treat, so what more could I ask for? The person I was with could see it on my face. She turned to me and said "You really enjoy life, don't you?" That's exactly how I was feeling on that cold winter day.

I think one of the reasons I'm so bad at establishing celebratory holiday traditions is because I always want to try some new experience. Until a few years ago, I bounced around from place to place a lot, and was rarely "home" for the holidays.

Instead of having a specific tradition, to me celebrating is about the people you're with and the experience you're having together. I remember the Christmas Eve dinner at a cozy little pub in London with tiny little booths and a huge roast, getting to know a new friend a little better who has since turned out to be one of my closest friends. And the New Year's Eve in Cornwall, in a b&b whose owner wore a reindeer hat while serving rich treats and hosting silly games. And of course there are the times I made it home to visit my parents, wherever they happened to be living at the time, for wonderful visits surrounded by Christmas ornaments placed on all of the cultural artifacts throughout the house.

For me, those visits are most worth celebrating because they're not a given. I've always been of the opinion that I don't know what adventures life has in store for me, or what the future holds. So I'll celebrate with my friends and family as I go along each step of the path.

Martha Practices Celebration

I remember back in high school a friend invited me to her graduation party.

Me: What is it?
Friend: A graduation party.
Me: For what?
Friend: Graduating.
Me: Weren't you supposed to graduate?

Ditto college acceptance party. First job party.

I didn't have a crazy strict upbringing but I definitely remember there was no tolerance for resting on your laurels.

No point getting excited about A's until you had straight A's. Straight A's don't matter - do you have the 4.0? Why freak out over the 4.0 until you're in college? College is just a gateway situation until you have the job. Do you have it? DO YOU?

Okay, great, a job ,but is it secure? Have your benefits kicked in? Did you get your first review? What about a raise?

Then at my first job, I met my friend E.

E likes a little celebration in everything.

She had me over for a dinner. Beforehand, I received a hand written invitation. At the event, she had typed up cute menus. Everything was beautifully plated. We said cheers. Cheers! We celebrated the fact that we were having dinner. BIZARRE! And addicting.

Next thing I knew, I would throw out cheers for anything.

Now we've already established from previous posts that I'm not modest and if I do say so myself, I'm intelligent, and I'm also a fast learner. So I took to celebrating like a fish to water.

I ROCKED IT.

Was it 5pm? Cheers.
Did I get mail? Cheers.
Good TV shows on tonight? Cheers and cheers.

I couldn't have learned it at a better time because writers need to celebrate, like Lisa said. There's too much rejection. Too much angst. Too much repeated beatings on your self esteem.

So finished manuscript? Cheers. Who cares if you have the agent.
Agent? Cheers! Who cares if you have the deal.
Book Deal? Cheers!!!! Screw your sales numbers.
Sales numbers? Cheeeeeers! Eff your next book contract.

Cheers to me, cheers to us, and cheers to you!

Lisa is a Celebration Junkie

I love to celebrate. Give me a reason and I’m there. You finished your first manuscript. Hooray, break out the champagne! You took the plunge and started exercising. Let’s take a walk! Your kid passed his driver’s test. Let’s have a glass of wine! You passed your first class. Yippee, here’s a great big hug.

I really do think it’s important to celebrate the small things. Because life throws us so many curves and unexpected roadblocks that when we hit a high, it needs to be catalogued and acknowledged and well, celebrated.

So one of the things that happens once you become a writer is that there are milestones along the way that perhaps really only seem like milestones to other writers. (Or at least that’s what we like to tell ourselves). Seemingly little things that deserve a check mark on a list of actions that make us REAL writers.

Each of these moments are little triumphs in their own right.

Having a plotting breakthrough.








Pens plotting and query reading






Finishing a draft. Crafting a query letter. Hitting send on a manuscript.

Your first rejection.



A good reminder card given to me after a series of rejections

Tackling the revision letter. Re-sending your manuscript.

Your first book signing.



Rachael's first signing

Your first meeting with your editor, agent, publicist. Starting a blog. Starting a grog. Building a website. Your first interview.

Finding your book in a store.





A night of bookspotting (which is NOTHING like trainspotting)







Your first release. Your first award. Your first mention in the NYT Book Review. Your first list.

You celebrate for yourself and you celebrate for your friends. :)

I’ve hit some of these and I’m still waiting on others. But one thing remains constant...each time I hit one, the Pens will be there to celebrate with me.

Happy New Year! May 2011 be the year for you.


xoxoxo,
Lisa

We Can Celebrate -- Yes, We Can!

L.G.C. Smith

When I told my mother that we’re writing about celebration on the blog this week, her eyes filled with tears. “I’m so sorry,” she said. “I wish I’d known how to celebrate and taught you kids how to.”

Sigh. It’s the holidays. Melodrama comes easily.

But it’s also true that my mom and her sisters have a strongly Puritanical streak that makes them suspicious of anything smacking of celebration. Their idea of a good time is pitching in to help clean up after a healthy, low-fat, low-sodium, sugar-free, high fiber dinner. You know. Raw broccoli and cauliflower. Non-fat plain yogurt dip. Boneless skinless chicken breast grilled with one of those unsavory No Salt Herb Blends. Six low-carb vegetables cooked without a single drop of butter or olive oil (or flavor). Unsweetened pumpkin pie in a whole grain crust with no butter, lard, or even organic palm shortening (transfat free!), and the custard made with acorn squash (hubbards are too sweet, don’t you think?) and two drops of blackstrap molasses instead of sugar, tofu for the milk and eggs, and whipped powdered non-fat milk on top.

Okay, that’s not entirely fair. My mom never cooked that grimly. There were a few supposedly celebratory meals in my youth that bad, but they weren’t my mother’s fault. Completely. She once talked one of my aunts into using real whipped cream on the pumpkin pie–unsweetened, of course.

A celebratory teeth-baring at Mom's last birthday.

When there was no threat of encroachment by her sisters, my mom cooked normal fat and sugar-laden celebratory vittles. Fried chicken. Chocolate cake with real chocolate (not carob or some other crap substitute). Mashed potatoes loaded with butter and rich gravy. As my sisters and I got older, we made the celebration food better and better. For a while there it was fondue on Christmas Eve, standing rib roast or filet mignon on Christmas day, gluts of champagne, homemade eggnog and lovely snacks on New Year’s Eve, and turkey and all the fixings on New Year’s Day. It all felt very subversive.

Then my dad got diabetes, my niece arrived allergic to beef, I realized I was poisoning myself with gluten, and various other health concerns cropped up. We’re more measured in our celebratory feasts these days, but we always have a few areas of hedonistic excess. Usually these involve champagne, wine, and chocolate. Imported cheese. Sometimes a bûche de Noel.

My sister spent several hundred dollars on fine chocolates this holiday season, and my mother made a few comments. Unsupportive comments. This occasioned further extravagant chocolate purchases and more comments, culminating in the tears over the Pens Celebration theme. My mother has great remorse that we don’t know what to do with a celebration aside from throwing food at it.

At which point I reminded her that her mother hadn’t exactly taught her how to celebrate owing to being certifiably crazy for most of my mother’s childhood. Mom grew up viewing celebrations as potential messes that would need cleaning up, literally and figuratively. Better to ignore the whole business if possible.

My parents whooping it up at a grandchild's bithday last year.

While I will admit to not being much good at celebrating, I have learned that gratitude offers a reliable path in. I’m good at gratitude. I would never take a proper pumpkin pie with lightly sweetened whipped cream for granted, even if I’d rather have half a gluten-free bûche.

Celebration, for me, comes down to letting gratitude gladden my heart. Sometimes it’s the sort of thing Juliet talked about last week, the angle of sunlight in midwinter, or the big changes that Rachael marked this year. It can be a joyful song, even if not always from Kool and the Gang. It might be a party to which I’m grateful to be invited, even if all I can do is quietly panic while I’m there. It might be the small diligence of having written every day for four years, and starting the fifth.

It might be making a gingerbread house with the Leezlet.

As long as there is something for which to be grateful, there is cause to celebrate. Loudly. Quietly. With snacks or without. Alone. With family. With friends. With strangers. It doesn’t matter how.

I’m off to polish off my sister’s Recchiuti Fleur de Sel caramels with my grumpy-gus mother -- with a handkerchief in my pocket and celebration in my heart.

Happy New Year from the Pens!

Hope the New Year brings love, laughter and happiness!!

LOVE, THE PENS

Celebrate Good Times, Come On.

I’m not usually a fan of big declarative statements. Just as soon as they leave my lips something comes along to prove me wrong or shake my faith. But on this I’m pretty sure I can stand firm, no wavering.

If not even the tiniest, most tucked away part of you doesn’t light up at Kool and the Gang’s Celebration, then we probably aren’t going to make it as friends. 

There it is. I’ve said it. It’s out there. No backsies. 

There's a party goin' on right here. 

I’m not saying that you have to love it the way that I do. You don’t have to be instantly transported back to being twelve years old and dancing in the aisles of the Oakland Colosseum as the A’s win another game. You don’t have to remember grooving in the back of your dad’s wood-paneled station wagon as he cranks up the volume on KFRC. But if your head doesn’t start to sway just a little when that horn section starts in, well, the truth is, I feel a little sorry for you. 

Cause that song is joy, plain and simple. I know that moments of joy aren’t really in right now, especially the spontaneous, bubbling over the brim kind. Those times where you laugh a little too loud in a quiet cafe, or can’t keep the smile off your face as you walk down the street. I get that. Times are tough. You don't have to convince m. We’re supposed to be solemn, cynical. We should be contemplating the end of the world and all that. After all, if the Mayan calendar doesn’t get us, then the mutated super bees surely will.

But let’s be honest, 1980, when this song came out, wasn’t exactly the best of times either. There were recessions and gas shortages, middle eastern conflicts and, of course, the killer bees. If we allowed ourselves a little over four minutes of unadulterated joy back then, and it didn’t hasten the end of world, then I doubt it’s going to now. 

So go on. Click the button. Play the song. Groove a little in your own way. You know you want to. If you don’t, it’s like the bees have already won. 

It's a Celebration

Walt Whitman confused me, and a whole lot of other college freshman, with the first line of his epic poem, Song of Myself:

I celebrate myself, and sing myself.

Once I got over the sense that Walt was just a little-- *ahem* --infatuated with himself… once I read on and realized by ‘himself’ he meant the entire world…I decided I could really get behind that concept.

I know, I know, it’s corny to say that we should celebrate ourselves more. But then…we really should celebrate ourselves more.

It's possible I overdo it a little…I know I tend toward the Polly-Anna-ish, “look on the bright side” of things. In fact, I have it on good authority that such an attitude can veer right on over into obnoxiousness. My son makes fun of me: Gee mom, aren't those fluffy pink clouds just the prettiest things you've ever seen? And just look at that flower -- isn't that magenta with orange just amazing?

But the truth is, such things are pretty darned cool.

With the everyday grind of life, the monotonous, never-ending struggle to pay the rent and get the kids to their doctor appointments and keep the paperwork straight and make sure we’re keeping up our end in our jobs and our relationships and our organizations…it is tough to lift one’s head up from the muck and the mire and imagine: What if I knew I was going to die tomorrow? What would I appreciate today? What would I see, and smell, and hear... and know I was going to miss?

None of which is to say that I don’t look ahead and strive for the next challenge, the next adventure. I vow I will not, ever, be lulled into complacency. But while I’m struggling for the Golden Ring, I don’t want to lose sight of the really good stuff along the way.

And I don't just mean the most obvious: Children, friends, wine, food, laughter, love….

How about...

That special shade of green one only sees during spring, in new growth
Commiserating with a dear friend over really good Scotch
The smell of rain when it falls on warm sidewalks
Strings of Christmas lights and the smell of pine in the house
The morning’s first sip of really good, dark French roast
The way loved ones’ eyes crinkle at the corner when they smile
Hitting “send” on a finally-finished manuscript (in which case I simply must dance through the house to Billy Idol, turned up to “11”)

Old Walt had quite a list, himself, but I liked this part especially:

The smoke of my own breath, Echoes, ripples, buzz'd whispers, love-root, silk-thread, crotch and vine My respiration and inspiration, the beating of my heart, the passing of blood and air through my lungs...

It may be corny...but it’s high time to celebrate.