Christmas in Spain

 

Christmas in Spain

Christmas is different where I live. For a start, it’s nowhere near as important. Christmas Day is celebrated just like any other bank holiday. The whole family, including grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins, goes to an eating place, usually out in the country, and shares a leisurely lunch. Large wayside inns – or posadas – are scattered through the countryside, mostly deserted during the week, but bursting at the seams on Sundays and holidays with jolly Spaniards having a good time. And on Christmas Day they are probably eating fish.

The big night for the grown-ups is New Year’s Eve.

          Anyone who turns up at the village hall is 

regaled with a glass of cava and a party bag full of streamers, poppers and those squeaker things. Also, most importantly, twelve grapes. On the stroke of midnight everyone attempts to eat all twelve before the last chime. (I have never succeeded in doing this. It’s harder than you think.) Then, unless you are still choking on the grapes, you drink the cava, unleash the streamers, etc. and make your way outside to watch a firework display of such magnificence that you wonder how on earth a tiny Spanish village can afford it. The thing is, in this part of Spain, parties are much more important than public amenities.

“But what about the children?” I hear you ask. “Christmas is supposed to be for the children.” The children have their day but it’s not Christmas Day, it’s Epiphany and it’s not Santa Claus who brings the presents but the Three Kings.

On the night of January 5^th the Three Kings ride into the village on gaily caparisoned mules, each accompanied by his assistant, throwing sweets into the crowd.

When they reach the village square, the cavalcade halts and the Kings dismount and take up their position on the steps. One by one, an assistant brings forth a parcel and a child’s name is read out, Amazingly, the Kings manage to provide every single child with a gift. How do they know?

As you might imagine the whole process is far less tedious than the queue for Santa Claus, since there are three magical beings handing over the gifts rather than just the one.

The whole thing is much more exciting, somehow, than my children’s annual visit to Santa Claus’s grotto in Lewis’s.

Of course, they’re not the real Kings, the real Kings come during the night when the children are asleep. In the olden days, the children used to leave their shoes outside the door and in the morning they found them stuffed with presents. Nowadays I doubt the amount of presents they get would fit in a child’s shoe. 

 

 In recent years there have been attempts at a Santa Claus takeover which mainly take the form of stuffed Santa Claus dummies artfully arranged to look as if they are climbing over the balconies of apartment buildings. Unfortunately, they give the impression of bizarrely-dressed burglars, rather than bringers of gifts. Somehow I don’t think it’s going to catch on. 

 

Book News:

If you are stumped for something to read, or indeed listen to over Christmas, here are some suggestions.

Six Tales of Christmas –

six heart-warming stories, now available not only in Kindle form and paperback, but as an audio book, narrated by the wonderful Jan McNamara. Don’t forget, if you already have a Kindle copy, you can get the audio for only £2.99.

The Christmas Present and Pumpkin – two heart-warming Christmas stories from Lynette Sofras. Of especial interest to cat lovers.

The Cottage at the End of the World

– dystopian novel only heart-warming in parts. Available as Kindle, paperback, hardback and now just launched as an audio with Jan McNamara. You can add audio to your existing Kindle copy for only £3.47.

Ballard – delicious first novel from Sara Reed.

 

Happy Christmas, one and all.

And happy reading

 

Love

Jenny

xxxxx

 

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Everything’s Happening at Once.

 Three new audio books, one short story and a new car!

 After a couple of months of lethargy, things are really moving on the Twist front.

Mr T had a test a couple of weeks ago and we’re now waiting for an appointment with the surgeon which will, we hope result in an early date for the second operation. Send vibes!

The thing I didn’t tell you is that we’re trying to buy an electric car. After borrowing my son Andy’s car, Colin, for a few weeks, I am hooked. The Spanish government is giving a generous grant for electric cars and we were anxious to get our order in before they changed their mind. But buying a car in Spain is a complicated process and if it involves applying for a grant it involves you in mountains of red tape, most of which makes no sense. For example, we had to prove we pay tax in Spain. Shouldn’t the government already know that? It’s not like our records would be hard to find. We’re probably the only Twists in the country.

But yesterday we finally sent off the last form and the garage confirmed we are all set to go. Our car will be ready in five months or so! It’s a Dacia Spring and we’re going to call him Dave. 

Incidentally, can anyone tell me how to pronounce ‘Dacia’?

Then my wonderful new friend and narrator, Jan McNamar has produced two audio books in record time. Six Tales of Christmas came out last month, well in time for Christmas, and The Cottage at the End of theWorld will come out any day now.. Don’t forget you get your first audio book free with the Amazon Audible free trial. If you’ve already bought the kindle copies, you can add the audio for £2.99 UK.

Not only is Jan a brilliant narrator, but she produces beautiful advertisements, including a video on You Tube https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pCY-Z6KRd-E

I am SO impressed.

Right now she’s working on Hidden Agenda. I’m expecting her to come up with the full book in the next couple of days. 

Here is  the new cover.

I have also written, but not yet published, a new story with the working title The Pretend People. It’s based on a series of really weird dreams  I had as a child.

 In the meantime, Google, in its infinite wisdom, decided to change my website so much that I can no longer do anything with it. I tried various sites and in the process discovered I am useless at creating even a simple blog. I finally got one I was happy with but about one in 12 people who looked at it (including me) got an unsafe site warning. I complained bitterly and they seem to have fixed it now. So, apologies to all those who were following my old blog. Here’s the new site. https://bookswithatwst.blogspot.com/

Let me know if you have any problems accessing it.

 Meanwhile, have a great day and keep reading.

 

Love

Jenny 

Xxxxx

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Back to Work

 

Now Mr T is back on his feet and life is getting back to normal, I’ve been able to get back to writing projects.

 

I was already working on a sequel to A Gift for Murder and was one chapter in when everything ground to a halt. But a couple of weeks ago a lucky encounter on Facebook offered another project.

 

I don’t know about you, but I have a love/hate relationship with FB. On the one hand I love it because it enabled me to find three special friends I had lost touch with and I have since made lots of new friends who have become, if you like, real friends.

On the other hand, there are an awful lot of weirdos out there.

 

When I first joined FB I accepted every offer I received, happy that people wanted to be my friends, but after a while I began to suspect that a lot of these people were not what they seemed. Call me paranoid, but now I check each one. Are they an author? Do they read? Do they like dogs? So that was what made me notice the request from Jan McNamara. She certainly reads and likes dogs but also she is a narrator who  lives and works in Canada.

What a perfect person to do an audio book of The Cottage at the End of the World, I thought, My books are mainly set in England but my main readership is in America. A Canadian accent – half way between the two – might be ideal.

I looked her up on ACX – the audio production branch of Amazon – she has her own studio and she has an impressive number of audio books under her belt. I listened to her voice and liked it very much – young, clear and friendly. So I asked her and she accepted. Hurrah!

 

Three chapters in, we had been talking about what we might do next and she suggested we pause The Cottage and do a Christmas book. “We’ve just about got time,” she said.

So that’s the next thing on the agenda, folks. Yesterday she finished it, in record time and with no errors. It should launch on Amazon by the end of the month.                                                   

I’m so excited.

I haven’t forgotten about the sequel – working title, Murder is a Fool’s Game – and I’ve picked up from where I left off. This one needs a fair bit of research into Morris dancing and folk rituals in Oxfordshire. I’m looking forward to that, but something else has grabbed my attention.

I recently had a conversation with some friends about a series of weird dreams I had as a child – two conversations, actually, the first with a couple of old friends and the second with my trusted writing group of 3 authors. They all said I should write the dream sequences as a story. Now I can’t seem to do anything else until I’ve written it.

The more I think about these dreams, the more intrigued I am about where they came from. They occurred long before I had any experience of science fiction, beginning when I was about 6 or 7 years old, when most of my reading consisted of Enid Blyton books and long before Doctor Who was broadcast, which I think was my first encounter with that genre.

But now I analyse those dreams, I find myself interpreting them against a background of alien invaders and a multi-dimensional universe, ideas which are now well-entrenched in literature.

 

It’s almost as if I were picking up these strange ideas from the ether – ideas which were way beyond the understanding of such a young child.
I’m hoping that I’ll have the story finished in a week or so.

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Meantime, keep safe and keep reading. There’s a universe out there to explore.