2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 7

I don't know about you, but once the tour starts, it seems to go so quickly! Can you believe today we will already have been on tour for a week?

Here are today's stops:


*Belle Wong @ MsBookish
*Bellezza @ Dolce Bellezza
*Snowball @ Come, Sit by the Hearth


Today, Kelly shares one of her favourite movies.

One lesser known, I think, Christmas movie is Emmet Otter's Jugband Christmas. I had not seen this movie in years, but I found a copy last year and had a nice trip down memory lane. This is an example of the music included on it.


What is your favourite lesser known Christmas movie?

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 6

Today's stops on the Virtual Advent Tour are at:


Teresa @ Teresa's Reading Corner
*Lisa @ Books. Lists. Life
*raidergirl3 @ an adventure in reading


Today's quotes come from Salvation Creek: An Unexpected Life by Susan Duncan.

The first part comes from page 113:

But my brother is dead. And Christmas since his death has been more of an ordeal than a celebration. However, this first Pittwater Christmas, when I live in the wooden house set at the water's edge, I am determined to get organised in a way that my brother would have approved, revive the Duncan family tradition. I want it to be a grand time for the fourteen people who will gather around the table on the deck at about noon. My goal is to restore, if I can a little of the old joie.

I begin making the pudding only a week before Christmas Day. Which is a bit scary because it's a three-day process. First, double the recipe. Then candy the orange and lemon peel and soak the raisins, sultanas, dates and currants in four times the suggested amount of brandy, letting the fruit sit for a couple of days.Stir (by turning over, not mashing!) every time you go past the bowl and make a wish. Invite everyone who passes to stir and make a wish. Watch them succumb to the sweet, dizzying brandy fragrance. see them close their eyes, breathe deep and hold their breath. Then wish.

'Never heard of this tradition,' Marie notes, wielding the thick wooden spoon. 'But it's a great way to get your pudding mixed!'

For a moment I wonder if it's a tradition. Then I remember Christmas at the pub. A local woman, famous for her puddings, soaked bucket loads of dried fruit in rough-as-guts brandy for a day or two in an old tin baby's bathtub in the pub's concrete-floored laundry. A barrel of batter, made from butter, eggs, dark brown sugar, ginger and flour, was poured on top, bringing the mixture to almost the rim of the tub. It was too huge and heavy for one pair of hands to mix, so the tub was ceremoniously dumped in the public bar for a couple of hours and everyone asked to have a stir and make a wish. By the time the bar closed at six o'clock, the batter had been turned over hundreds of times and the fruit was well and truly mixed in. A bit of cigarette ash and a slop or two of beer as well, I suspect.

After mixing, the batter was divided up and wrapped in steaming, floured calico, to be dumped in the copper boiler where the sheets and towels were washed on Monday mornings. The puddings were tied to a stick so they didn't sink and fill up with water, and the bobbed on the surface like giant dumplings for about six hours. They they were pulled out and hung from an indoor clothesline to cool down. I like to think now that those puddings were filled with the wishes of decent but reticent country blokes who would never dare say them out loud. As I recall, they were loaded with threepences and sixpences, which we warned guests about every year after one bloke swallowed a sixpence and nearly choked.

On Scotland Island, when I finally assemble the pudding mixture about three days before we're due to eat it, I'm anchored to the house for the next six hours, topping up the water in the pot. It's a broiling job but easily bearable. When the heat feels over-powering and sweat rolls down the valley in my back, I walk out the door and fall in to the sea. Nice life, huh?

And then from page 345

I start making the puddings in the weeks leading up to Christmas Day, to give them time to mature. The kitchen fills with the sweet, boozy smell of dried fruit soaking in brandy. And every time I see someone new arrive at the boatshed, I fly down with the bowl and demand they have a stir and make a wish.

'Is there a limit to the numbers of wishes?' Veit asks, his long arms lifting and turning the mixture carefully. 'Or should I repeat the same one every time I stir the pudding?'

His question stalls me for a moment. Why do we always say make a wish? Why not make some wishes? Why shouldn't we be able to make as many wishes as there is time for?

'Nope! There's no limit. Go for it!' I tell him

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 5

December 5
Memory @ Stella Matutina
Linda @ Hutt-Write Voice
Pogue @ Katzenjammer


Victoria Hislop is an author I really enjoyed discovering this year! This quote comes from pages 110 and 111 of The Island.

When Advent began, Giorgis and Eleni needed to decide how to deal with Christmas. It was to be their first one apart for fifteen years. The festival did not have the importance of Easter, but it was a time for ritual and feasting with the family and Eleni's absence would be a gaping void.

For a few days before and after Christmas Giorgis did not cross the choppy waters to visit Eleni. Not just because the vicious wind would bite into his hands and face until they were raw, but because his daughters needed him to stay. Similarly, Eleni's attentions had to be on Dimitri and they played out in parallel the age-old traditions. As they always had, the girls sang tuneful kalada from house to house and were rewarded with sweets and dried fruit, and after early morning mass on Christmas Day they feasted with the Angelopoulos family on pork and delicious kourambiethes, sweet nutty biscuits baked by Savina. things were no so very different on Spinalonga. The children sang in the square, helped bake the ornate seasonal loaves known as christopsomo, Christ's bread, and ate as never before. For Dimitri it was the first time he had enjoyed such plentiful quantities of rich food and witnessed such hedonism.

Throughout the twelve days of Christmas, Giorgis and Elenis sprinkled a little holy water in each room of their respective houses to deter the kallikantzari, seasonal goblins that were said to play havoc in the home, and on 1 January, St Basil's Day, Giorgis visited Eleni once again, bringing her presents from the children and from Savina. The ending of the old year and the beginning of the new was a watershed, a mile-stone that had been safely passed, taking the Petrakis family into a different era.

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 4

December 4
*Cindy @ Cindy's Love of Books
*Pamela @ Lavish Bookshelf
*Christine @ the happily ever after...


Today's quote comes from page 494 and 495 of Olivia and Jai by Rebecca Ryman. The book is set in colonial India and the main character, Olivia, has just been reconciled with her cousin Estelle.

It was the season of Christmas.

In the cosy downstairs parlour of the Birkhurst residence, the least formal of the reception-rooms, a tall conifer stood in a wooden tub, and it was splendidly decorated with coloured streamers, glass baubles, silver fairies in twinkling tinsel, gold stars, snowy white cotton wool, a cardboard Santa Claus and his rendeer, and banks of mistletoe and holly purchased with scandalous extravagance from Whiteaways. The house was filled with music and song and seldom heard gales of laughter. On Christmas Day the Donaldsons, the Humphries and, of course, Arthur Ransome had been guests at a veritable feast of trandational fare produced with uncanny skill by Rashid Ali andn the specially summoned Babulal. There had been gaily wrapped gifts for everyone, including the servants and their families, particularly the children. There had been crackers and fireworks, boisterous carol singing and generally uninhibited revelry such as had not been witnessed in years at the austere, under-inhabited mansion.

It was Olivia's second Christmas is India. And so different in spirit from that miserable occasion of twelve months ago in Barrackpore, which no one could now rustle up the courage to remember!

And then....

The Christmas festivities and frivolities had been her (Estelle's) idea. "A quiet Christmas?" She had echoed Olivia's desultory suggestion with horror. "Why, Amos will never forgive us that! If only for his sake, we must make it as merry as we can no matter what our own feelings." Olivia could not deny that she had been touched.

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 3

Welcome to day 3 of the tour! We hope you have enjoyed the contributions so far. We certainly have. We are also sure that we are going to have a great time visiting with the following bloggers today:

*Ana @ things mean a lot
Michelle @ The True Book Addict
*Melissa @ The Book Nut

Today Kelly shares one of her favourite holiday memories! Enjoy!

I am still a kid at heart during the holidays... I really enjoy The Muppets movies and have been watching them for years. They are just a part of Christmas. One of my favourite is Muppet Family Christmas when they sing 'Jingle Bell Rock'. It is very well-done!

What is your favourite movie from your childhood?

2012 Virtual Advent Tour: Day 2

What a great start we had to the tour yesterday. If you haven't had a chance to visit yesterdays blogs, please do so. One of them is even hosting a Christmas Puzzle where there is a handmade ornament for the person who gets the most guesses correct! I am not going to tell you which one though! You have to visit the blogs to find out!

I am sure it will be another great day as we get to visit with the following bloggers:

*Rachel @ a fair substitute for heaven
*kelley @ the road goes ever ever on
*Tasha @ Truth, Beauty, Freedom, and Books



Today's quote comes from page 71 of School of Essential Ingredients by Erica Bauermeister

He didn't even mind those early Christmas mornings when first one, then another toddler would climb into the bed that he and Helen had so recently fallen into themselves after a night of putting together wooden wagons, or bicycles, or dollhouses. He opened his arms and they piled in, trying to convince him that the streetlight outside really was the sun and that it was certainly time to open the stockings, if maybe not presents, when in fact it was usually only two in the morning. Helen would groan good-naturedly and roll over, telling Carl all she wanted for Christmas was a good night's sleep, and he would pull the children close and whisper the story of the Night Before Christmas until they would slowly, one by one, fall asleep, their bodies draped across each other like laundry in a basket. When the children got older, self-sufficient enough to go on their own midnight exploratory missions among the boxes under the tree (where, more often than not, Carl and Helen discovered them sleeping in the morning, Carl found himself missing their warm intrusions into his dreams.

2012 Virtual Advent Tour Day 1

Welcome to the 2013 Virtual Advent Tour!

We are so excited to see what everyone has to share with us this year. Our first stops are at the following blogs:

Tami @ Just One More Thing...
Andi @ Estella's Revenge
Katie @ Book Addict Katie

Like last year, we are going to be sharing some quotes that I have been saving up during the year specifically to share for the tour! There will also be some songs and other things. What that means is that there will be something new to see or hear at the blog every day.

Today I bring the first of the Christmas quotes for this year. I think that the quotes this year reflect the way that my reading changed this year - lot of Australian quotes to be shared. Today though, I am starting with a quote from The Bungalow by Sarah Jio.


From pages 121

I couldn't stay in on Christmas Eve thinking about Papa and Maxine roasting chestnuts together back at home. I shook my head, and made my way down Someone in a room upstairs must have found a radio, and even rarer, a signal out across the great blue ocean that carried the sweet, beautiful, pure sound of "O Holy Night" sung by Bing Crosby. My knees weakened as I listened to the song drifting over the airwaves like a warm breeze, comforting me, reminding me of Christmases in Seattle. With cider, Carolers. An enormous fir tree in the entryway. Papa smoking by the fire. Mother fussing about wrapping gifts. Maxine's sweets, though I didn't have the taste for them now. And Gerard, of course. I couldn't forget Gerard.

"Makes you sentimental, doesn't it?"

I turned around upon hearing Stella's voice behind me. "Yes," I said. If only she knew.

Her face appeared softer in the dim light of the entryway. Has the island changed her? "It hardly feels right," she continued. "No snow. Not even a tree. For the first time, I'm homesick. Really homesick." "Me too," I said, locking my arm in hers. we stood there listening until the song ended and the radio frequency become garbled - the moment lost forever, swallowed up by the lonely Pacific.

and then from page 123

As we walked outside, the radio's signal regrouped and began transmitting a weak version of "Silent Night" sung in a foreign language I didn't recognize. It sounded strange and lost, which was exactly how I felt.

Once inside the little chapel adjacent to the mess hall I let out a gasp. "Where on earth did they get a tree?" I eyed the fir standing to attention near the piano. "A Douglas fir, in the tropics?" Mary grinned, "It was our big secret," she said. "The Social Committee has been planning it for months. One of the pilots brought it over with the supplies last week. Nobody thought of decorations so we had to get creative. The men deserve a tree on Christmas." The choir began warming up to our left, as I looked at the fir tree, adorned with tinsel - handmade from finely cut tin foil - and read apples on each bow. Some of the women must have loaned out their hair ribbons, as there were at least two dozen white satin bows from top to bottom.

"It's beautiful," I said, blinking back a tear.

By the way, there is still time to sign up for the tour if you haven't already! Head to the tour announcement post to join in the fun!