On Second Thought

I love Christmas! And I love Christmas romances. As of the first week in November, I have read about two dozen 2015 Christmas romances, a mix of historical and contemporaries, single-titles and anthologies and have enjoyed them to varying degrees. But for the most part, my favorite Christmas reads of 2015 have been reissues of older books, some of which have been part of my Christmas reading tradition for years. Rather than recommending one digital reissue this month, I am recommending these cherished Christmas rereads, a mix of collections, anthologies, and single stories.

From 1989 through 2005, Signet published an annual anthology of Regency Christmas novellas. The early anthologies were released the first week in November, the later ones in early October, and for fifteen years the Signet anthology inaugurated my annual Christmas reading marathon. Thus, it is hardly surprising that my list of favorite Christmas digital reissues includes many stories that first appeared in those anthologies.

Mary Balogh had a novella in the very first Regency Christmas anthology and in nine others that followed. In 2003, Balogh published Under the Mistletoe, a collection that included four reissues: “The Star of Bethlehem” (1989), “The Best Gift” (1994), “Playing House” (1990), and “No Room at the Inn” (1995), along with one new story, “A Family Christmas.” A digital version of Under the Mistletoe was released in 2004. All of the stories are good, but “The Best Gift” is my favorite. In this Cinderella story, the heroine Jane Craggs, a Jane Eyre type, is asked to escort one of her pupils to the young woman’s uncle’s home for Christmas and is thus given the opportunity to teach her student a more important lesson than any learned in a classroom. She unites a cynic with his illegitimate daughter and achieves her own Christmas dream and fairy tale ending. The way Balogh weaves the story of the father learning to love his young daughter into the love story is a marvel. That the magic of Christmas transforms even a lonely, obnoxious adolescent may be a greater marvel.

This year Balogh released two digital collections of her Signet Christmas novellas.  Christmas Gifts includes “The Best Christmas Ever’ (1991), “The Porcelain Madonna” (1992), and “The Surprise Party” (1995). As with the earlier collection, all three stories are heartwarming, but the last one is extraordinary: a reunion story that takes place when the widowed Ursula, Lady Carlyle, and Timothy, Viscount Morsey, each, propelled by duty rather than love, show up at the home of three orphaned children. The children are the offspring of Ursula’s brother and Timothy’s sister whose marriage sparked a quarrel that led to the dissolution of Ursula and Timothy’s betrothal.  As the two fall in love with the children who bravely accept there will be no Christmas for them this year, they also fall in love with one another again.

Christmas Miracles offers another trio of reissued novellas: “The Wassail Bowl” (1196), “The Bond Street Carolers” (1997), and “Guarded by Angels” (1995). The first and last stories in this collection are marriage-in-trouble tales, but “The Wassail Bowl” is the stronger story, despite confusion about the hero’s name. (He is identified as the Earl of Wyndham and the Earl of Wycherly, an error that even superficial editing should have caught.) But the story satisfies regardless of the distracting error. The scene that gives the novella its title is unforgettable  . Wyndham totally deserves the sticky bath he receives when his countess throws the contents of the wassail bowl in his face. Forgiveness, reunion, and healing truths along with scene-stealing children make this a touching story.  “The Bond Street Carolers” is another favorite. Lord Heath is an arrogant aristocrat who dislikes children and Christmas, but when he hears a boy with the voice of an angel singing with a group of carolers on Bond Street, he is determined that the boy sing at his annual concert. Soon he finds himself falling in love with the boy’s mother, a lovely, lonely window and looking forward to building a family with her and her two children, the boy soprano and a little girl who wants a papa for Christmas. Mary Balogh likes children in her Christmas stories, and she gives them integral roles. It is Katie’s Christmas prayer and her brother’s astounding voice that propel this story. The hero and heroine make a brief appearance in Simply Unforgettable (2005).

Balogh has also written four Christmas novels: Christmas Belle, Christmas Beau, A Christmas Bride, and A Christmas Promise. All except Christmas Belle are available in digital reissues. A Christmas Bride is an excellent redeemed heroine novel, but I am particularly fond of A Christmas Promise, one of Balogh’s cross-class romances, a trope she does especially well. In this one, distant spouses in a marriage of convenience, Randolph Pierce, Earl of Falloden and Eleanor Transome, daughter of a wealthy merchant, gather at the earl’s country estate with his aristocratic friends and her boisterous, bourgeois family to celebrate Christmas—and in the case of the latter, to remember Ellie’s late, beloved father. The reserved earl unexpectedly delights in the warm affection and seasonal revelry of the Transome relatives, and he and Ellie find their way to the kind of marriage her father wanted for her. A trio of secondary romances adds to the joyous mood.

Carla Kelly, Mary Jo Putney, and Jo Beverley have also reissued Christmas novellas in collections guaranteed to make your holiday brighter.

Carla Kelly’s stories are unusual in that they are filled with ordinary people and are sometimes darker Carla Kelly’s Christmas Collection (2011) includes “The Christmas Ornament” (1998), probably the most light-hearted of Kelly’s stories, with an Oxford scholar as hero and a pair of matchmaking fathers; “Make a Joyful Noise” (1997), a story with a hero who finds his pregnant heroine when his mother gives him the task of recruiting new voices for a choral competition; “An Object of Charity” (1999), a tale featuring a ship’s captain who’s coming home to an estranged family and the niece and nephew of his first mate, killed in action, for whom the captain feels responsible; and “The Three Kings” (1990), in which the hero and heroine travel through war-torn Spain. The last story is especially poignant as Lady Sarah Comstock, a bluestocking whose scholar brother was killed in error by the French, and Colonel Luis Sotomayor, a Spanish soldier who dreams of being reunited with his motherless young daughters, make their way towards Ciudad Rodrigo amid the devastation of war and people who cling to their Christmas rituals even when facing danger and deprivation.

than the norm.

Kelly’s  Coming Home for Christmas (2011) is a set of generationally linked stories: “A Christmas in Paradise,” set in California in 1812, with a Navy surgeon as hero and the daughter of an embezzler as heroine; “O Christmas Tree,” in which the heroine, a nurse in the Crimean War, is the daughter of the lead characters from the first story and a shy hero who totally stole my heart; and “No Crib for a Bed,” a Western that features another military doctor, the grandson of the doctor in the first story and the son of the nurse in the second story, and the down-to-earth heroine who saves him from what would have been a disastrous marriage. In typical Carla Kelly fashion, all of these characters are ordinary people captured in stories that reveal how extraordinary they are. That all of this is accomplished with Christmas meanings threaded throughout the stories makes them all the more treasured.

Season’s Regency Greetings (2014) contains my two top favorite Carla Kelly stories. “Let Nothing You Dismay” (2003) features Cecilia Ambrose, a half-Egyptian, half-English schoolteacher, and Lord Trevor Chase, the younger son of an aristocratic family who scandalized his social circle and worried his family by becoming a barrister who defends the poor, particularly children. One of the many reasons I love this one is that the pragmatic Cecilia saves the guilt-burdened Trevor. In “No Room at the Inn” (2002), Lady Mary, who has been reared as the daughter of an aristocratic family, finds out that she is actually plain Mary McIntyre, the granddaughter of a farmer. Caught in a snowstorm and with no room at the inn, she and her traveling companions find shelter in the home of Joe Shepard, the younger son of the steward on the estate where Mary was reared. Mary falls in love with the widowed Joe and the boy he looks on as his son but who is really his late wife’s son by her first husband. It’s a sweet story that carries a message about where happiness can be found and where the heart of Christmas lies.

I also recommend Kelly’s Christmas novel, Marian’s Christmas Wish (Signet, 1989; Cedar Fort digital reissue, 2011). Like all of Carla Kelly’s romances, this one is filled with flawed, human characters who come alive for the reader. Marian is young, not yet seventeen, with a candor that makes her seem even younger at times. But she has intelligence, a loving heart, and an irrepressible sense of humor. Gilbert Collinwood, Earl of Ingraham is a wonderful hero—understanding, great-hearted, and surprisingly unlordly for an aristocrat of such high rank—and with all the appeal of a man who combines tenderness with an understated charm. Despite their differences in age and fortune, I can imagine these two growing old together, celebrating Christmas through the years. Some might argue that Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand (Signet, 1994; Signet, with Miss Grimsley’s Oxford Career, 2003; digital reissue, Cedar Fort, 2011) is not a Christmas book, but it opens not long before Christmas, the hero and heroine marry on Christmas, and it ends with an invitation for a Christmas visit from the happy couple. Moreover, the book is packed with themes like giving and forgiving and restoration that are at the heart of Christmas. Roxanna Drew, a beauty whose physical charms are surpassed by the loveliness of her character, is one of my all-time favorite romance heroines. She is a loving wife, a devoted mother, a passionate lover, and a human being with faults, dreams, memories, a rich interior life, and a well-developed moral compass. Fletcher Rand is another of Kelly’s heroic former soldiers who has been shaped by the horrors of war and yet maintains a sense of humor, an abiding kindness, and a willingness to do what needs to be done. I’ve read Mrs. Drew Plays Her Hand at least half a dozen times since I first read it during Christmas 1995, and each reading reveals something new I love about the book. Carla Kelly’s newest Christmas gift to readers is not a reissue, but the three stories in Regency Christmas Gifts (2015) are well worth reading.

Two more of my all-time favorite Christmas romances can be found in Mary Jo Putney’s Christmas

Revels (2002). “Sunshine for Christmas” (1990) pairs Lord Randolph Lennox, the man whose careless words indirectly lead to Lady Alys Weston’s flight from her home in The Rake, with Elizabeth Walker, an English governess who comes to his rescue. It’s set in Italy, a lovely bonus. “The Black Beast of Belleterre” is a wonderful Beauty and the Beast tale that is classic romance. It always leaves me happily sighing, no matter how many times I’ve read it before. Christmas Revels also includes “The Christmas Cuckoo” (1991), “The Christmas Tart” 1992), and “A Holiday Fling,” a contemporary story loosely connected to MJP’s only contemporary series and published for the first time in this collection.

Jo Beverley’s Mistletoe Kisses and Yuletide Joy (2013) includes three novellas and extras for history buffs (a description of Christmas in the Regency period) and holiday cooks (seasonal recipes, new and old). “The Gift of Light” (1996) is a delightful story in which Miss Kitty Mayhew—too tall, too thin, and too lacking in a romantical nature (She’s even immune to Byron) to be a proper heroine—has her plans for a quiet holiday interrupted by a pair of cats and an irrepressible viscount, appropriately named Tom. “The Christmas Wedding Gambit” (free on the author’s website for several years) centers on the Gretna Green wedding of Viscount Greystoke to plump, plain Frances Guysley to avoid a marriage to her lying, scheming, prettier sister. “Star of Wonder” (1999) is a rare tale set in 999, featuring a novice nun as heroine, a hero whose home has been captured by Danish Vikings, and a legendary star sapphire pendant which purportedly was given to the baby Jesus by one of the Three Magi. I also recommend Beverley’s A Mummer’s Play (1995) published as a standalone novella in 2013. It is the touching story of Justina Travers whose intense grief for her dead fiancé leads to her plan to use the traditional mummer’s play on Christmas Eve to gain entry to Torlinghurst and find proof that Lucky Jack Beaufort, the only man to survive the ambush in which her fiancé was killed, is a traitor. Instead she finds that Lucky Jack, now the Duke of Cranmore, is a man scarred by war more deeply than she could have imagined.  Don’t forget Beverley’s Christmas novel, Christmas Angel (2001) and reissued in digital format in 2013. The third book in the Company of Rogues series, it is the story of Leander, Lord Charrington, in search of a bride who will not fall in love with him, and Judith Rossiter, immortalized as the Angel Bride of her late husband, popular poet Sebastian Rossiter, who is facing a lean Christmas for her two children when Leander proposes. (Beverley’s Winter Fire, the sixth in her Malloren series, is another of my annual holiday rereads, but it is not a reissue. Both print and digital versions were released in 2003.)

I also recommend the following:

Barbara Metzger: Greetings of the Season and Other Stories and An Enchanted Christmas (both include five Christmas-themed novellas first published in anthologies); three Christmas novels: The Christmas Carrolls, Christmas Wishes, Father Christmas. Metzger is an especially good choice for those looking for Christmas romances rich in humor.

Patricia Rice: Christmas Enchantment (reissues of “Christmas Angel,” Christmas Goose,” and “Tin Angel”). The third story is my favorite.

Donna Simpson: A Matchmaker’s Christmas (reissue of a 2002 novel), a perfect read for those who love the matchmaker trope since the matches are multiple.

If Santa is reading this, I want to get my requests in early for next year’s reissues. I’d really love to have a digital collection or two or three of Edith Layton Christmas stories, and I promise I would faithfully reread each year a digital version of I Will by Lisa Kleypas.

I haven’t forgotten that there are reissues of some wonderful contemporary Christmas romance stories. Look for those next month.

 ~Janga

PJ here. For those of you who stopped by yesterday expecting Janga's On Second Thought for November, I offer my sincere apology. I was certain Monday (today) was the 15th so imagine my surprise (and horror) when I logged on last night to format and schedule this post only to discover yesterday was the 15th! So sorry for the confusion. I hope you enjoy this wonderful holiday historical romance post from Janga! 

Have you started Christmas romances yet this year? Have you found any keepers? Do you have favorites that you re-read each year?