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.
Book
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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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