Welcome to day one of the Days of Christmas Giveaway Celebration! Each day for the next several days (excluding weekends), I will be hosting your favorite authors in a variety of genres for a chance for you to win their books!
Here’s how you enter…just leave a comment for the authors – it can be an encouraging comment or, please feel free to share your favorite Christmas memory or tradition. You can enter to win on as many days as you wish! For example, you can enter to win the two books for today and also the two books I’ll have on tomorrow’s post and the two books on any other day. Remember, anyone can enter, but subscribers to this blog (who have confirmed their subscription) receive two entries.
A winner will be drawn for each day at random using random.org. All winners will be announced on December 19, just in time for Christmas!
We have two wonderful books up for grabs today…
Tamed is an action-packed Christian novel.
“Cowboy by Staci Stallings is a love story that will tug at your heart and have a special place on your own book shelf.” For more information, please see http://ow.ly/79VkM
And now, for fun, here are Staci and Sarah’s favorite Christmas memories/traditions!
The Great Tumbleweed Christmas by Staci Stallings
West Texas in December means tumbleweeds. Rain in the summer will make any field not plowed for a crop grow thick with iron weeds. When winter hits, the iron weeds wilt and wither. Then the wind starts, breaks the stems, and off they go.
When I was a junior in high school, we had a wet year–perfect conditions for growing tumbleweeds. Now my mom had this thing about flocking our real Christmas tree every year. She would take the tree to the barn and cover it in flocking. However, that year for some unknown reason she had an idea…
Why buy a Christmas tree when she could take two tumbleweeds, tie them together and flock them? Funny. I never thought of my mom as particularly crafty, but she put her heart and soul into that Tumbleweed Christmas tree. She flocked it green (yes, they have green flocking… why? I don’t know!).
Then she reflocked it white. Well, all that flocking made the thing extremely heavy. Plus, a tumbleweed stem was never meant to go in a Christmas tree base. (I’m not even sure how they got it to stand up in the living room at all, but they did.)
Christmas Eve was always when our family celebrated Christmas because Christmas Day was spent at Grandma’s house. My sister and I were old enough by then to “know” things about Christmas, but for the sake of hanging on for one more year, Mom and Dad sent us to our room. With my brother’s help they commenced putting gifts under the Tumbleweed tree.
That’s when we heard the crash! My sister and I ran out only to find Mom, Dad, and my brother sprawled with the presents under a giant tumbleweed that had lost most of its flocking in the topple from its perch in the corner.
The moral? Texas tumbleweeds were never meant to be flocked and decorated! Leave them in the fields where they belong!
Favorite Christmas Tradition by Sarah Witenhafer
Like many people, Christmas as a child was not the happiest time for me. So when I began my own family I stuffed the season things to make it memorable. My kids were going to get enough traditions to convert any Grinch.
On the list to buy each year: Christmas mugs, Christmas books, Snowbaby ornaments, Christmas candy to stuff the advent calendar, more candy to decorate the gingerbread house, Christmas snow globes, and of course – a new Nativity set – let’s not forget Jesus! We did Christmas crafts for friends and stamped cards. Then there was the baking, twenty different types of cookies, at least six dozen of each, made ahead of time and frozen so we could feast on them Christmas Eve.
Added to all of this were the Christmas events I thought were a must – Zoolights, Nutcracker, and such. Needless to say, I had our Christmas budget blown before we purchased one gift! Plus, I was exhausted from chasing away ghosts of Christmas past. That’s when my husband, Dale, and I started to reevaluate.
We ended up dropping the shopping spree. No more mugs, snow globes, books, or Nativity sets. How many do you really need? We scaled back the candy, and we limited the cookies to twelve different kinds.
And what we kept became sweeter. Christmas Eve is spent in candle light, singing hymns, reading from Luke and eating cookies. We break bread together, reminding ourselves of Christ’s mission: He came to save us from our madness, to free us from our past, and to bring peace with God into every season. May God rest you this Christmas.
Join Sarah Witenhafer and 9 of her author friends at WoMen’s Literary Cafe’s Christian Book Launch, December 13-15. Ten authors will discount their ebooks to just 99 cents. Buy 3 get 1 FREE!
Link: http://www.womensliterarycafe.com/content/december-2011book-launches
Don’t forget to enter and join us tomorrow for authors Amanda Beth and Lisa Mukkove Johnson!
Penny Zeller 