Tuesday, 5 December 2017

Guest Post - An Australian Christmas by Rebecca Raisin - Blog Tour

It’s always fun for me to write books set at Christmas in a wintry location, like Winter at Cedarwood Lodge, because it’s the total opposite of what we have in Australia. I adore writing about my characters drinking mugs of hot cocoa and snuggling in their Christmas onesies in front of a roaring fire! In reality, I’ll be wearing a light summer dress and flip flops and will spend most of my time by a pool or the ocean as it’s our summertime and always sweltering, no cocoa in sight!

While same as the characters in the Cedarwood series, we’ll have a traditional Christmas feast with all the trimmings, we’re also likely to cook most of it outside! We use the Weber for our turkey and the BBQ for our seafood, and we cook as little as possible in the oven so we don’t make the house too hot with all the baking.

Christmas day for us starts with Santa’s visit and because we’re good he gets to our country first, which is always amusing to me that most of the world is still sleeping and we’re ripping wrapping paper off presents and partaking in our first glass of bubbles – hey it’s Christmas, anything goes!
We usually have a light breakfast, and gather our ingredients and head to our brother and sister-in-law’s place because they have a pool. Then it’s all hands on deck to help prepare the mammoth feast. Usually everyone is given a certain food to make, either you’re on entrée, side dishes, mains, or dessert. Everyone tries to outdo each other with making the fanciest food around.

By the time we’ve eaten and half stumbled into a food coma, the kids have got their second wind and want to traipse up and down the neighborhood looking at the Christmas lights on the houses. Every year they seem to get more elaborate, and the kids marvel at them and ask if we can decorate our house with Christmas lights. I picture the decorating scene with Chevy Chase in National Lampoon’s Christmas vacation and swiftly tell them no…

After the clean-up we head home and sleep for what feels like days, but is in actual fact only hours because the boys shake us awake and need help assembling a four hundred piece Lego set (thanks a lot, Santa!) or batteries for some noisy toy that an Aunty (payback is coming your way!) bought for them. Because it’s Boxing Day, we obviously celebrate with another bottle of bubbly for brunch and eat whatever leftovers that were pressed into our hands from the night before while moaning repeatedly how hot it is.


I think there’s something about the idea of a white Christmas that appeals to the Aussie in me…

Thank you so much Rebecca for that snapshot of Christmas in Australia. 


Includes bonus material!

This winter it’s time to fall in love at Cedarwood Lodge…

After years of dreaming, Clio Winters is finally fulfilling her childhood dream of renovating the gorgeous old Cedarwood Lodge in Evergreen and turning it into the perfect destination for celebrations, weddings and extravagant birthday parties. The huge property used to be a bustling holiday camp, now Clio wants to bring it back to its halcyon days – which will be a lot of hard work!

Returning back to the small town of her youth she’s glad to have one of her best friends still around to lean on, Micah who is just as solid as he used to be. But with her own secrets pushing her to run from her glamorous life in New York, she’ll have to tread carefully, especially when the far-too-handsome-for-his-own-good contractor, Kai, shows up on her doorstep…

Sure she’s here in Evergreen to change her life, but there is no way she’s falling in love!

Previously published as three novellas.

Author Info:

Rebecca Raisin is a true bibliophile. This love of books morphed into the desire to write them. She’s been published in various short story anthologies and in in fiction magazines, and is now focusing on writing romance. Rebecca aims to write characters you can see yourself being friends with. People with big hearts who care about relationships, and most importantly believe in true love.



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