Boxing Day Reading

Hello everyone,

If you are anything like me then you'll love spending Boxing Day lounging around reading and recovering from the Christmas dinner food coma! I also like to prolong the magic of Christmas as much as possible, usually I do this by interspersing reading with festive movies. I have often wanted to find a suitably christmassy book to read around this time and this year I did.

My True Love Gave To Me is a compilation of 12 stories based around the festive season by contemporary young adult authors. I picked this up as some of my favourite contemporary authors are contributors, including Gayle Foreman, Jenny Han and Rainbow Rowell.

Two of the stories stood out the most to me, interestingly neither of which were written by the authors that drew me to the book. The Lady and the Fox by Kelly Link and The Girl Who Woke the Dreamer by Laini Taylor. Both of these stories are quite fantastical, they follow two young women who fall in love with mythical creatures/magical beings in their search for freedom from the mundane and their lot in life. I don't want to spoil them for you so I won't give too many details, but these two stories are very atypical romances and could easily have taken a darker turn...

I loved all the stories in this book, not just because they were festive, but for the characters. Each individual person was sculpted so perfectly that I wished all their stories were longer. I could honestly have read a book about each and every one, particularly North and Marigold in Stephanie Perkins' It's a Yuletide Miracle, Charlie Brown. My only niggle about this book is the cover art and the design. I don't think the pale blue is very festive really and the neon pink page edges are rather garish, the overall effect is of a book aimed at young children and not at the teen/young adult market. It would have been more appealing with festive colours or left as it was, but minus the bright pink! However, we all get taught not to judge a book by it's cover so I will try to ignore it and just love the stories and festive cheer. I think some of the stories will become favourites to be re-read around this time of year!

What are your favourite festive reads? Do you prefer something different, away from the festivities maybe? Let me know in the comments below :-)

xoxo

Secret Santa Adventures

Hello everyone!

I hope you are all having a wonderful day, whether you celebrate Christmas or not! For those of you who do, Merry Christmas!!! 

Now that it is out of my system, I wanted to tell you about my Secret Santa this year. I had it all planned out, 15 of us were playing so I was super excited.  I cut up small pieces of red card, wrote the names in gold glitter pen (of course) and sealed them with gold glitter and a snowflake. Everyone picked a name out of the santa hat in late November. Up to there it was going well, but then I went back to uni and all hell broke loose! Clearly my little elves playing the game should not have been left in charge haha, my request for everyone to take some of the wrapping paper failed miserably. The plan was for one person to bring the wrapping paper and everyone to take some and use it for their present, attaching the name tags I had lovingly prepared. The wrapping paper was plain blue, I mean come on! It wasn't even christmassy, but I told myself it would be fine and we would make do, but then one person waltzed off with it leaving no paper for most of us, myself included! Come the big reveal we ended up with all sorts of wrapping, including one wrapped in tissue paper and duct tape, however, it was a fantastic laugh with some weird and wonderful gifts being exchanged. Obviously I had to take photos of our surroundings too, they were so deliciously festive...

Moral of the story is this: 

1 - if you want it doing how you imagine, do it yourself! 

2 - who cares about organisation really, all that matters is the love, laughter and smiles exchanged on the day! 

Overall we had a fabulous time and laughed the whole night long, we spent the evening in our local pub the Queen's Head in Burley where they had the most beautiful decorations and also do some rather lovely food. If you live in the New Forest or are coming on holiday then check them out here. I have something a little different planned for secret santa next year, though for now it is a secret...shush! Enjoy the holidays y'all, eat, drink and be merry! :-) 

xoxo