Books

Here is a little sneak peak from Deck the Hall, my new book that will arrive in November. We have lot of fun right now decorating and photographing Christmas trees.

Our house hosts 12 Christmas trees; we have sixteen rooms so it’s not too crowded. This is one of our smaller trees. It’s almost impossible to decorate that many trees every year so half of them are trees with a more permanent decoration. The balls are secured with wires and most of them are shatter proof. I store the trees upright with a cover around them.

If the tree has some delicate balls, I remove them and store them separately. This saves me a lot of time, it takes me approximately 10 minutes per tree to freshen them up, fluff all the branches and hang the extra balls. It would have taken me 2-3 hours to dress them from start, some trees even more.

Christmas Magic, the first book in a series called The Ultimate Christmas Handbook, is finally out. It’s for sale on Amazon for $4.99 and you can also find it in the Kindle lending library.

This is a book about Christmas traditions, how we form them and how they influence us. The book has over two dozen holiday recipes, all beautifully illustrated with large full-color photographs and step-by-step instructions.

There are also a series of short stories; some of them will tell you different things about Christmas, others are Christmas inspired stories about our Christmas traditions and how they evolved into what they are today. Hopefully you will enjoy reading Christmas Magic as much as I have enjoyed writing it.

I got a mail from Alexa, she writes: I googled the island, you made it sound beautiful. I saw the harbor and houses, it’s so real. So do Kostas and the tavern exist?

I think I can answer this without giving away any spoilers. The answer is actually both yes and no. The tavern exists, I have spent many evenings there sitting on the patio and looking out over the old harbor.

Kostas and Agafi is a different story, they are a fiction of my imagination. The inspiration though actually comes from an old couple that I met on another island in Greece. We were staying at their hotel and they had such an interesting dynamic between them, a very philosophical look on life, especially late in the evening when they sat down in the tavern with their ouzo and started to talk to the remaining guests.

My friend, “Booklover” from Huston send me the following question. "I never been to UK, but when I read about the illuminations it sounds crazy, are they really that crazy? Why did you choose Blackpool?"

Believe me, they are. My husband and I had a long weekend in Blackpool some years ago and let’s just say that Blackpool makes Las Vegas feel stylish and elegant. And like Las Vegas it has an Eiffel tower in miniature size.

Here you can see some pictures. The first one is the welcome sign at night, with the spaceship and the green aliens. Then we have a daytime photo with a strange display of farm animals. Believe me; they don’t look better at night.