The holiday season is meant to be all delight and joy, I’m sure. Personally, I’m struggling to organise a book launch and tour next month, not to mention dealing with a leaky roof and having to cough up an obscene amount of money to repair it.  I live in one of the rainiest parts of the UK, you see, where westerly winds sweep in bringing a lot of the Atlantic with them, which they then dump on my head in the form of relentless rain. Or more accurately, they dump lots of the Atlantic on the 300-year-old roof of my house, which has decided that three centuries of holding back the weather is more than enough, thank you. That image up there? Me, on seeing how much rain made its way into the house.

Repair work finished last week, and the company came and took away their scaffold today, so I’m looking forward to a dry Christmas indoors no matter what the weather may be outdoors. Believe me, that’s a vast improvement! The delight and joy are beginning to make themselves felt.

Anyhow, I have a good excuse to limit today’s post is to the most appropriate Victorian Christmas card image I could find…

I’m sure that I’m not up to decoding the subtext on this one, but weren’t our Victorian forebears positively weird when it came to finding images to represent Christmas? Dead robins, murdered frogs… and this rather spooky Jack Frost character chasing Father Christmas’s elves. No. No subtext, just a heartfelt agreement with the hope that Christmas Day was very gay for all of us.

I hope you’re all enjoying the holiday season, whatever holiday you celebrate at this time of year, and that 2020 brings you all that you deserve. Which is, of course, all the health and happiness you desire.

About Anna

Anna was a communications specialist for many years, working in various UK government departments. These days, though, she is writing full time. She lives with her husband in a quiet village tucked deep in the Nottinghamshire countryside. She’s supported there by the Deputy Editor, aka Molly the cockerpoo, who is assisted by the lovely Mavis, a Yorkie-Bichon cross with a bark several sizes larger than she is but no opinion whatsoever on the placement of semi-colons.

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