Come Home for Christmas ~ With Rachel McMillan

Erica here. I'm thrilled to host my friend and fellow author Rachel McMillan here on the blog today. You're going to love her, (and if you haven't read her stories, you're going to love those, too!)

Christmas in my Creative Home ~ Rachel McMillan

Christmas is by far my favourite time of year. My dad always told us that the season truly starts for most around the time Americans celebrate their Thanksgiving, but I always started playing Christmas music (my favourite part of the holiday) the day after Remembrance Day. I come from a small town in Ontario where snow is in abundance and the gorgeous redbrick Victorian houses near the lake frost their shutters and rooftops with glorious Christmas lights. Where the homey, old-fashioned coffee shop with its paisley table cloths is shadowed by a ginormous Christmas tree and the smell of constantly baking goodies seeps through from the kitchen to meet my nose as I sit with my notebook. The nostalgic Christmas lover in me still loves to listen to the same Christmas CDs and still loves to visit my hometown to escape the bustle of Toronto’s also magical urban Christmas lights. But as I have grown older, Christmas has started to look a little bit different. 

As a single woman, I have married my love of Christmas with my love for travel. While I still ensure I spend time with my family in my hometown, the past few years have found me carving out some Christmas-time research travel time in Prague, London, and the city of my heart: Vienna.

My love for Vienna is borne of a Christmas tradition I have kept since I was a girl. While some cuddle up with their families to read The Night before Christmas and others try British enunciation through the staves of Dickens’ A Christmas Carol and others choose the holidays as a time to crack the spine on Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, I have read Vienna Prelude by Bodie Thoene every Christmas since I was 10 years old. I won’t give you the exact math but that is over 25 times. It’s a tradition I keep for myself. Yes, while curled up on my parents’ couch on a visit home to my small hometown. Sometimes even in Vienna as I research my own Vienna-set contemporary romances and an upcoming historical novel. While not technically a Christmas book, two of the major sequences of the novel—especially of the hero and heroine’s romance ---are set at Christmastime in Vienna. While most kids dreamed of Prince Edward Island, a step through a wardrobe or a trip to the Shire, from that first reading and through subsequent Christmases afterward, I knew that there was only one dream city for me. While my first time there wasn’t at Christmas, there is something amazing about returning to it while the dozen Christkindl Markets including those at Stephansplatz, Schloss Belevedere and Maria Theresien Platz fill the whipped cream city with constant music, the smell of roasting maroni (chestnuts) and the colour of tiny porcelain mugs filled with punsch and glühwein. It is nothing short of magical to see the Graben and Kärtnerstrasse as well as the city’s iconic Ringstrasse alive with Christmas lights that drape in the shapes of icicles, chandeliers, and because it is the city of music, tiny notes.

The magic of a Christmas read that fostered my imagination as a child and had me wishing on our Christmas tree helps cultivate what I write as an adult. I just returned from a trip to Vienna last week--- a glorious Baroque city that is so far from the Christmases of my Ontario childhood that it makes me blink in surprise. Yet, while there, I always feel like it, too, is my home. Maybe my home in that I spend so much time there fictionally ---in my Three Quarter Time series and in an upcoming historical romance releasing with Harper Collins in 2021. Maybe because it has long been my imaginative home as I sink into the resplendently described pages of Vienna Prelude every year.

The fabric of our lives is so carefully sewn by the experiences that spark our imaginations and creativity and as authors it is so wonderful to think we have the potential of fashioning a new home for someone. A new tradition. I bet when Bodie Thoene began the first draft of her impeccably researched pre-war series she didn’t know some Pastor’s kid in small town Ontario would spin it into a life-long love letter to a city opulent and ornamented and dripping with Christmas lights. I bet she couldn’t have foreseen that the same Christmas read would spark my lifelong passion for Classical music, my years of training in classical voice and my desire to write books of my own someday.

Because we, writer, wield a powerful ability to ignite passion, to inspire travel, to prompt a reader to try a recipe or sign out a historical tome from the public library.

Christmas can mean home in the literary sense, yes, but it can also mean home in the creative sense. The city I so fell in love with in the words penned by another is a huge muse of mine: as deep an integral a character to my writing life as the human counterparts I set against its backdrop.

This Christmas take extra time to look at how a favourite song is crafted: the simple lyrics of the Alpen Carol Silent Night, the majesty of Charles Wesley’s ability to construct the entire trajectory of the Gospel message in Hark! The Herald Angels Sing. Pay attention to the resonant themes in It’s a Wonderful Life and how the story paints a deep picture of a small community unified by hope and goodwill. Think about the structure that continues to make A Christmas Carol a classic: even if your preferred version finds Gonzo in the role of Charles Dickens. Christmas for writers is a goldmine of themes, symbol and lush locales. Gatherings and parties and laughter and light. It’s a constant exercise in sensory description.

This Christmas make the holiday your creative home: who knows what small kid in some small town will have integrated your words as their longest held Christmas tradition.

Rachel McMillan is the author of The Herringford and Watts mysteries, The Van Buren and DeLuca mysteries and The Three Quarter Time series of contemporary Viennese romances. Her next work of historical fiction, The London Restoration, releases in Summer 2020 with Harper Collins and takes readers deep into the heart of London's most beautiful churches. Dream, Plan, Go (Harvest House) is her first work of non-fiction. Rachel lives in Toronto, Canada and is always planning her next adventure.

Erica here again: Rachel is giving away a kindle copy of Love in Three Quarter Time! 

Leave a comment here telling us of the city where you'd most like to experience Christmas! 

A winner will be drawn and announced in this week's Weekend Edition!

Here's a bit about Love in Three Quarter Time:

Evelyn Watt fell in love with Austrian marketing director Rudy Moser the moment he stepped into their Boston firm. With his ice blue eyes and chocolate-melting accent, he is as refined as she imagines his home country to be. When Evelyn finds herself unexpectedly unemployed right before Christmas, she is left with an unknown future until Rudy steps in with a job appraising, assessing and cataloging heirlooms, lending her American vernacular to the translated descriptions to give each item international appeal. Evelyn will live in Vienna for the months leading up to a grand auction at a party held in conjunction with the Opera Ball—on Valentine’s Day.

Vienna is a magical blend of waltzing, antiques, and bottomless cups of Einspanner coffee at the Café Mozart. When a secret from Rudy's family's past blows in with the winter chill, Evelyn is forced to confront how well she knows the object of her affection. Her café tablemate, the gruff and enigmatic Klaus Bauner might be the only person who holds the key to Rudy’s past. But could that key also unlock her future? In the days leading up to the Opera Ball, Evelyn finds herself in the middle of the greatest romance of her life…as long as she doesn’t trip over her two left feet.

Don't have a kindle? Don't worry! You can enter the drawing below for a chance to Win One! (If you don't win, don't worry there either. You can download the free kindle app for your phone, tablet, or laptop/desktop computer, too!)


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