Hello!

I'm going to keep today's message short. If you're a household that celebrates a holiday this time of year, you've got a lot more on your mind than my silly little emails. I'll try to respect that.

(Note, however, that that's not stopping me from sending one. Because tradition or something.)

This afternoon, I'm going to be selling books at an artisan Christmas market on the big central lawn at the Hill Country Galleria in Austin. Should be cool. I've only sold books in person once before, but that was indoors, in an environment where I know a lot of people (because it was after the Author Nation conference, and that's my jam). This time, though, I'm not going to know anyone and I'll be set up outside. It should be a really interesting test of whether or not my books are intriguing to people who've never heard of me before.

Fingers crossed. And, you know, if you're local, you should come out. At least I'll know someone that way.

Beyond that, I'm preparing for a chill holiday. In the past, I've taken these last two weeks of the year off. Interestingly, doing so has always made me feel restless, bored, and steeped in overall malaise. I think it's because I'm happiest when I feel like I have a purpose, and just sitting around doesn't feel like purpose. I'll do stuff with family, but usually I've ended up with far too much free time because there's not hours upon hours of family stuff to go around. So this year, I'm filling that would-be-idle time with writing and working.

(But I do love my work. So there's that.)

Before I let you go, I'll share one personal holiday tidbit -- something you didn't know about this particular author.

In my experience, there are two types of people who decorate for Christmas. One type is very organized, creating beautiful displays both inside and out. The other just throws all their family stuff together in a fit of complacent irony.

Everyone in my family is the latter. We see all the other homes around here with perfect trees covered in white lights and just one or two colors of perfectly-spaced, perfectly-matched ornaments ... and then we come home to our place, where my kids (16 and 20) have delighted in filling our tree with the ugly, mangled, scribbled-on pieces of shit they made in daycare when they were too young to know better. It's homey. I like it that way.

But my favorite hideous ornament of all is one that will forever be known as "Constipated Santa."

I imagine Constipated Santa began life as a respectable ornament. However, 50 years of being dropped, accidentally stepped on, mauled by several cats and dogs, and other atrocities has turned him into something from a horror movie. His name comes from the squatting position he was cast in: presumably a Santa-esque hop of joy, but a position that always struck me as his attempting (and failing) to drop some presents down the chimney, if you know what I mean.

We should have thrown Constipated Santa away decades ago, but at some point he crossed from "piece of crap" to "hilarious piece of crap." Now he's the last ornament we hang, and he always goes front and center.

Exhibit:

Note the way his hat was not simply hanging off his head. The hat was, it turned out, molded into the back of his head. Stripped of fabric, CS now sports a giant fleshy snake-thing coming off his skull like that character in Star Wars.

One of his legs was amputated by one of my past dogs (you can see teeth marks on his head-snake). You can't tell from this photo, but there was a crisis one year when I was at college wherein his face was bitten off. My mother eventually found his face under the couch and reattached it.

What a terrible, hideous thing to have on our tree. It will be passed down to my kids so that they can horrify their own offspring, the way that I have horrified them.

I hope you have some holiday traditions that are as stupid as ours. Happy season to you, whatever you celebrate!

JT

P.S: Remember, I'm launching my brand-spankin-new book Winter Break on the day after Christmas, because it's fitting that it be read over a real-life winter break (in the northern hemisphere, anyway). I'll send you an email on December 26th to let you know it's available in ebook and paperback ... or if you want to make sure you don't miss it, you can pre-order the ebook version of Winter Break right now using this link. It's discounted during pre-order and will remain discounted for the first handful of days after launch, but after that the price will go up.