Seasonal Confusion

It was late 2019 when Phil, from our writing group, had the idea of producing two collections of Christmas stories – one for adults and one for children.

It is difficult to summon the Christmas muse once the festive season has passed. By the time we felt Christmassy enough to produce seasonal stories in 2019, it was too late to publish them, but we could reschedule for 2020.

We’d have best part of a year to get it together and published in time for the following Christmas. . . wouldn’t we?

No doubt some of you are ahead of me by now.

Covid decreed otherwise and lockdown arrived.

Writing group meetings moved online, and some members struggled with Zoom or found their technology wanting. Some struggled to write at all in the uncertainty and enforced isolation of lockdown.

But Phil kept safe the random Christmas stories, poems and memories that have trickled in over the past two years.

So it is, with the renewed hope of a return to ‘real’ meetings, and with the aim of overwriting memories of the past un-festive festive season, that we revisit the Christmas project.

Our writers, when bullied in a burgeoning Springtime to write about Christmas, have been scouring their memories and imaginations and we’re now all feeling quite Christmassy. (The weather is helping at the moment. As I write this, the UK anticipates the coldest May bank holiday since records began.)

This time we have an illustrator among our ranks. Having decided the children’s volume would benefit from pictures, Jane’s drawings will now be gracing both collections.

Our hope is that all local meetings will return to normal in time for us to sell copies at our monthly u3a meetings. (Did I mention we’re a u3a creative writing group?)

So watch this space later in the year for a third and fourth collection of stories, poems and memories from the Whittlesey Wordmiths.

What are your hopes for a return to something approaching normality?