Cookies, Book Lights & Orange Garlands
Ten Things So Lit
Hello my friends!
If you want signed & personalized copies of my books for the holidays, order from Gibson’s — I’ll sign as many as you buy!
If you want an author visit for 2025, get in touch; I adore visiting with my stuffed dog and bag of book treasures. Adaptable for any age group.
(If you need bookish gift ideas, check out A Book Lover’s Gift Guide)
Here are ten things so lit (literary and otherwise):
Um, not to be dramatic (just kidding, let’s be dramatic) but where has this $13 Little Book Light been all of my life? (oh, right, Amazon. But check your local bookstore!) Good-bye reaching-reaching-waking-myself-up-bedside-lamp or headlamp (sexy sight that it is). I love this little light for reading before sleeping.
This $10 Date Stamper is great fun and so satisfying. We can now all play librarian to our heart’s content. I use it to “date” artwork, journal entries, and write letters. A kid would love this. And also anyone older than that. Like me.
Christmas cookies. Making, baking, delivering. We call it The Great Cookie Express and everyone is old enough to help. My favorites: soft sugar cookies, candy cane kiss cookies (OMG), peanut butter kiss, snowballs, and ginger.
Substack Cookie Queen,
writes:“What I learned when writing the book, American Cookie, was that cookies are expressions of love, small squares of a nostalgic place in time, stains in a beloved old family cookbook, remembrances of cookie jars and a childhood past, little dots connecting the holidays in our lives. Cookies are timeless, precious, and remind us of people dear.”
get ready for the cookie express! Stringing Dried Citrus. Ya’ll this is so fun, easy and beautiful. My creative daughter, Brynne, made a hanging citrus garland for her room. It was so pretty that I forgave her for using my last grapefruit. Simply thread a needle with twine or a similar string, then carefully poke the needle through the center of each orange slice. See this for a how-to-visual.
an orange garland at a winter window Onions: this from
: "I thought deeply about how wild it is that cutting an onion can make you cry, like how fragile and weird and tender is that? And how powerful. Man, onions are one powerful vegetable." Isn’t that so good? Big respect to the onion.- writes: “So here’s another idea. Put these big dreams on your schedule first.” When you’re freshest, when you have a chunk of time, when you can focus. “And when you carve out time for things, you make progress — and that progress itself is often motivational enough to nudge you to find more time.” Another great Vanderhack.
Make a Zine (“zeen”): I used to have my anatomy students make zines - it’s a great way to learn anything, and they are so fun. I learned how to make a zine from
who has a terrific collection. While I prefer hand-drawing, I finally figured out how to make a digital zine (and felt like a genius :) for school visits; the kids were thrilled to have their own little McNifficent book. Here’s a pdf McNifficent zine you can print out…Christmas cards: Brynne and I have cards for sale at our local bookstore, Morgan Hill Bookstore in New London, New Hampshire. Restocked today!
“The day will come when, after harnessing the ether, the winds, the tides, gravitation, we shall harness for God the energies of love. And, on that day, for the second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.” —Pierre Teilhard de Chardin
St. Lucia Day was December 13th. Lots of people are familiar with the girl with the crown of candles—but don’t know her story. Read it here and marvel at Brooklyn Swenson’s gouache painting. The holiday falls during the darkest time of the year and is a symbol of the return of light.
BONUS: The Story of Christmas: many people, especially kids, no longer know the reason we celebrate Christmas, but every Dec 24th, we gather around the lit Christmas tree and read from Luke 2 and Helaman 14, where the prophecy of Christ’s birth is written. Beautiful.
Happy December.
Amy 🕯️
the last part:
Listening: two audiobooks via free Libby app: Calm Christmas and a Happy New Year by Beth Kempton (lovely) and The Women by Kristin Hannah (terrific; harrowing)
Reading: What Does it Feel Like? by Sophie Kinsella. What happens when a novelist has incurable brain cancer and then writes a book where the main character - a novelist - has incurable brain cancer? A moving, short, and brave story…
the last last part…
p.s. I’m days away from finishing my latest draft (a boarding school mystery!)
read with me:
The Unforgettable Guinevere St. Clair is part-mystery, part understanding of the human heart 💖
Ten Thousand Tries is Golden’s quest to save his dad and the soccer team ⚽
The McNifficents is one summer with six rambunctious kids and their miniature-schnauzer nanny 🐕 New Hampshire’s 2024 Great Reads for Kids selection!
Love the cookie express and I’m going to tell my teenager about the dried fruit garland. So pretty! Happy holidays!
3. Not cookies, but an indelible memory (and current Xmas task) is bullar, Swedish coffee bread infused with cardamom.
9. I recall enjoying Teilhard, but I suspect that over our multi-hundred-century history rather more than two careless tinkerers knocked rock to flint and didn't bother to tell others in the cave about it, due perhaps to embarrassment over the resulting unsightly blisters.
10. As a Swede I do have memories of the lovely St. Lucia carol (Lu-see-a in svensk, Lu-chee-a in italiano) and sweet blonde girls precessing with candle head dresses, but not directly through family - my Swedish Nannie had little interest in the holy, preferring jaunty polkas on her harmonica. A grisly end in 304 Sicily indeed, perhaps colored by medieval tastes in bedtime stories, but she had a revenge of sorts, since Emperor Constantine made Christianity the state religion only 30 years later, at least in the east. Why oh why in our history must beauty be so often polluted with gore?