Day 12: Kris Radish: 12 Authors of Christmas

MERRY CHRISTMAS!!!!!

Christmas Eve in the Radish house was the same year after year and that is where my fondest Christmas memories lie. I have two brothers and a sister and all we really cared about was the arrival of Santa Claus but there was lots of stuff happening before he came to visit.  There was dinner and then we would start slapping ourselves so we could stay awake and go to Midnight Mass. Back in the old days when I was a child it actually snowed in Wisconsin.  Sometimes we would follow a snowplow to church or home so we could get where we were going. A funny thing always happened while we were at church - not that church itself wasn't funny enough most of the time with anxious children jumping all over the place and those priests wearing dresses. Somehow Santa knew we were at church and he or she - Santa could be a woman you know - would deliver the goodies while we were gone.  Isn't that amazing? The festivities really got cranking after that with wrapping paper all over the place and the Radish kids zipped up with cookies and my parents zipped up with a few holiday cocktails.  The best part was feeling loved and safe and happy and that is why to this day I keep a string of lights up all year round.  Bottoms up - Santa is coming!

GIVEAWAY!  The Shortest Distance Between Two Women to remind my readers that even if we argue with our siblings during the holidays we are still required to love them!

Bestselling author Kris Radish takes the emotional measure of mothers, daughters, sisters, and friends in her wise and wonderful new novel of a woman unsure if she’s on the verge of a breakdown—or a breakthrough.…
After all these years is there any way you would see me again? When Emma Lauryn Gilford heard the voice on her answering machine, she thought, How dare he? She’s put a lot of distance between herself and Samuel, filling her life with work and family, lavishing her attention on her lovely nieces and a garden that’s the pride of Higgins, South Carolina. So why does his voice still have the power to make her heart skip? Why can’t she stop thinking about this man she’d forgotten so long ago?

Emma has always been the dependable daughter, the mediator of the controlled chaos always surrounding her high-strung sisters and her widowed mother, Higgins’s own senior citizen seductress. But with the annual Gilford family reunion just around the corner, at least two of her sisters approaching meltdown, and her favorite teenage niece taking sanctuary in her home, Emma’s concrete wall of self-denial is showing cracks. And on the other side is a life she can’t put off living a moment longer.

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