Karen Sandler

Tag: thanksgiving

  • Any Excuse for a Celebration

    Christmas 1985s
    That’s me, front left, 7 months pregnant with son number 2, ladling some of my grandmother’s fabulous gravy.

    In my family, any holiday was an excuse for a party, and usually included a table full of food. New Year’s Day was ham and potato salad, Easter featured deviled eggs and bunny cakes (and plenty of candy since Lent had ended), there were special meals for Mother’s Day and Father’s Day, barbecues for Memorial Day, softball games in the park for 4th of July and fireworks and hot dogs after, Labor Day was a last hurrah after summer, we all dressed up in costumes and ate more candy for Halloween, and the table would groan with turkey, mashed potatoes, stuffing, gravy, cranberries and pumpkin pie for both Thanksgiving and Christmas. If any month didn’t have a holiday (or even if it did), we celebrated birthdays, lots and lots of birthday, each one with its own cake and party.

    Celebrate sSo it’s no surprise that when some author friends suggested we do a joint holiday anthology, I jumped at the chance. Five of us contributed lovely, happily-ever-after stories to the Celebrate! anthology (buy it here), spanning five holidays throughout the year. Since they’re short stories between about 30 and 60 pages each, they’re quick reads, but each one is long enough to feature a satisfying romance. They’re kind of like little, bite-sized romance novels, like that gooey Cadbury egg you might savor at Easter or a luscious truffle you enjoy at Christmas.

    Here’s the lineup of authors in Celebrate!:

    • Linda Barrett, “Man of the House,” Mother’s/Father’s Day
    • Rogenna Brewer, “One Star-Spangled Night,” Independence Day
    • Barbara McMahon, “Love and all the Trimmings,” Thanksgiving
    • Karen Sandler (moi!), “The 8th Gift,” Hanukkah
    • Debra Salonen, “My Christmas Angel,” Christmas

    Take a taste of the holidays with Celebrate! Buy it here.

  • RTW – Balancing Reality and Fiction

    This week, YA Highway’s Road Trip Wednesday asks the question, How do you balance hectic times like the holidays with your writing schedule?

    Um, yeah. How do you do that?

    I’m not sure I’ve entirely figured that one out. The good news is, I’ve been under contract with a publishing house nearly every holiday season for the past dozen or so years. The bad news is, that means I’ve got a deadline staring me in the face every year all through the holidays.

    Which means I have to stay focused and on task in November and December. Yes, I’m longing to go Christmas shopping (or Hanukkah shopping–our family goes both ways). I’m dreaming of baking Christmas (or Hanukkah) cookies. I’m jonesing to go up the hill to one of the local tree farms to cut down my tree. But I can’t just take off all the weeks between Thanksgiving and Christmas (much as I might wish it) because that darn book isn’t going to write itself.

    So what do I do? I do cut myself some slack. I choose a day or afternoon for the tree cutting, for the baking, for the decorating. I work hard on the days when I don’t have holiday festivities planned and get as much written as I can. I tend to do the Christmas shopping in one fell swoop, demanding a list from everyone, and storm the stores on a weekday when they’re less busy. And I keep an eye on my word count and the number of days remaining until the deadline.

    I do find it annoying to have to write during the holidays. Even worse, my birthday is smack dab in the middle of the holiday season, so there’s another distraction. But I also know that I’m very lucky to be working under contract, to have that deadline, so who am I to gripe?

    How about you? How do you keep working during the holidays? Christmas carols on or off? Christmas cookies stacked on your desk? Is your office decorated? I wanna know how the rest of you do it.

  • Happy Turkey Day

    To those in the U.S., happy Thanksgiving! I hope whatever you feast on Thursday is abundant, delicious and entirely to your liking. Even that weird green bean casserole with the funny crunchy stuff on top.

    Now I’m off to make some pies.

  • Pumpkins & Dressing & Yams, Oh My!

    It’s time for that annual Thanksgiving ritual of the cooking & baking frenzy. I’m not even hosting the feast this year and I’m still in a tizzy over my culinary chores. I’ve signed on to bake a pumpkin pie, make a pan of dressing (it’s not stuffing unless it spent some time as turkey innards) and whip together a yam casserole.

    Of course, I can’t just pick up one of those pre-made pie shells at the market. My step-dad, Harry, who taught me the finer points of perfect pie crusts, would be spinning in his grave at the thought. Yet I have this love-hate relationship with pie dough. You’ve got to get the shortening cut in just right. You can’t add too much (or too little) water. And if you muck about too much with rolling it out, you’ll end up with a tough, hardtack mess. I barely even look at my pie dough after it’s mixed, and I roll it out so gently, it never even feels the rolling pin.

    Then there’s the pumpkin for the filling. Yes, I could get the canned stuff. But it is so cool to bake an actual pumpkin, peel it and moosh up the pulp, then throw that into the pie. Can anyone tell the difference after you add milk, eggs, spices and a ton of sugar? Well…what does that matter, anyway? With fresh pumpkin, you get bragging rights. People are that much more impressed with your pie.

    If I’m using fresh pumpkin for the pie, I’ve got to use real yams for the yam casserole. Not that my grandma, a fabulous cook, ever did. She’d buy those canned yams and she wouldn’t even mash them the way I do. She’d dump them into a baking dish as is, throw on some brown sugar and butter, shove them in the oven until they were hot. Then she’d top them with marshmallows and call it good.

    I, on the other hand, lovingly bake fresh yams, peel & moosh (see pumpkin, above), then mix in orange juice, cinnamon, ginger and brown sugar. I spread the mooshed yams into a casserole dish, heat them through, spread miniature marshmallows on top…then the real fun begins. Do you know how long it takes for miniature marshmallows to burn when you put them under the broiler? About 1.2 seconds. One moment you’re looking at white marshallows, the next, they’re black and about to burst into flame. It’s a real Thanksgiving tradition, the burning of the marshallows. One year, it took three applications of marshmallows before we got golden brown instead of black. No lie.

    But the dressing should be easy, right? Well, mostly. Other than having to bake a pan of cornbread for crumbs. And cutting up bread into cubes (store bought bread–I’m not a complete masochist). Chopping celery, onions, apple. Cooking sausage. Sauteing the vegies with some fresh sage plucked out of my garden. Then mixing the whole mess together. No marshmallows required, burnt or otherwise.

    That’s my day. Spending crazed hours in the kitchen. Ain’t I got some fun ahead of me?