I had big plans. With one book completed and delivered at the end of October, and the next at the stage of gentle gestation (as opposed to painful labour) I thought this Christmas I might finally achieve a level of festive organisation that has always previously eluded me – trays of homemade mince pies in the freezer, a beautiful wreath made from forest-walk foragings on the door and thoughtful presents creatively wrapped with sprigs of greenery and dried oranges – that sort of thing. But then my mum became ill and was admitted to hospital on the 29^th November (as I was struggling to acquaint myself with the wisdom of the man in the cable knit cardigan) and Christmas was reduced to Mariah Carey on the radio on the drive to and from the hospital, and late night present-buying from soulless online retailers after everyone had gone to bed.

So, festive cheer has been a bit thin on the (frozen) ground here, and I’ve been relying on books for my fix of Christmas comfort and joy. I’m very much a seasonal reader, and I love returning to old Christmas favourites at this time of year, as well as searching out new ones. I’ve also unearthed the ghost story I started writing a couple of Christmases ago, from the depths of my ‘Unfinished Projects’ folder. I never meant it to be a book – it’ll be shorter than that, but too long to be a short story. A novella, perhaps (though I’m not really sure what those actually are, or if I’ve ever come across one in the wild…) Enough to fill a December evening, or one of those slow afternoons between Christmas and New Year, when there’s nothing on the telly. I’d like to finish it, but my mum came out of hospital yesterday, very frail and unwell (she would say, darkly, far more so than when she went in) and we’ve woken up this morning to a broken boiler pump and a very cold house, so it looks like my Christmas ghost might go the same way as the wreath and the orange slices and mince pies. But maybe I’ll post the first bit of the story here, now I’ve unearthed it, as a sort of promise to myself that it will get finished, and an incentive to carve out the time in these days of a hundred different demands.

As I’m writing this (in bed, with two hot water bottles and my breath appearing faintly in front of me) the sun is coming up on a day of Christmas card perfection – apricot sunrise over a thick, glittering frost. It’s a day to head out and walk until your cheeks sting, or to find a windowseat in a warm coffee shop and order something cinnamon-spiced while checking things off on a last-minute list, not listening to jaunty hold music while waiting for the boiler repair people to answer and staring despondently at a list that begins with ‘sort care package’ and may as well cycle through ‘solve climate crisis’ and end with ‘achieve world peace’.  

But I guess that’s the reality for most of us at this time of year, when the pressures of the season can clash painfully with our expectations of it. For some reason I still feel that I should be sitting by the fire in some garland-decked Elizabethan manor house, wearing cream cashmere and drinking mulled wine as I write my tasteful cards (with a fountain pen) when all the evidence points to the fact that I will spend the days of December bundled up in lumpy cardigans, dashing around on emergency missions to by sellotape or paracetamol or dishwasher tablets, and cursing the fact that the only cards left in Sainsburys are either the top dollar 3D glitter-encrusted Dickensian street kind, or ones featuring cartoon sprout characters. (Before realising, with guilty relief, that I’ve missed the last posting dates anyway.)

This is why we need Christmas books. So we can inhale the whole holly-and-ivy, pine-scented winter wonderland through someone else’s eyes (not that you inhale through your eyes, but you know what I mean.) So we can vicariously sit by the roaring fireplace in someone else’s Elizabethan manor house, and drink mulled wine, which may or may not have been handed to us by a gruffly attractive man in a polo necked jumper. And all we have to worry about is the snow piling up in the dusk outside and whether we’ll be able to get home…

And so, in the spirit of the season, I offer you the start of my Christmas ghost story (written in 2018 under the title The Winter Guest, which I spotted on the cover of a book in Waterstones the other day – that’ll serve me right for being so slow! I’ll post more in the run up to Christmas.) I hope that wherever you are, whatever the pressures on your day and things on your mind you can take some time for yourself to sit down with a cup of tea and enjoy some seasonal reading of some kind or another. I’d really love to hear your festive recommendations and top Christmas reads – please do share here or in the comments on Instagram!

(You can find The Winter Guest here)