There is no lonelier time of the year than Christmas for someone away from home and alone. It seems that the rest of the world is composed of couples or family groups. Restaurants are filled with party revelers, shoppers in happy clutches hurry from store to store chatting and laughing, their arms filled with bags and boxes. Recorded carols spill out onto the sidewalk adding to the joyous cacophony. You weave your way through all this. Isolated. Unseen. You think this is what it must be like to be invisible. This is what it is to be alone and far from home at Christmas.
The reasons for your aloneness could be one of many. You may have chosen to take a job in a distant city. Perhaps there has been a recent divorce, or even a death in your family that has left you alone. You survive. That’s all anyone can do. The rest of the year, being alone is bearable. At times even pleasant. But at Christmas time survival somehow is much harder. At Christmas, aloneness is almost intolerable. No one to laugh with. No one to trim a tree or share an eggnog with. One feels a bit like the proverbial boy with his face pressed against the window of the candy shop.
What to do? Go back to the lonely apartment and eat a dinner of scrambled eggs? Stop in a restaurant and sit at a table for one, watching other tables of twos, fours and sixes eating and laughing together?
I remember one Christmas like that in my life. In my case it wasn’t because friends didn’t invite me to join them. It was because in the depth of despair over my husband’s death I didn’t want to be around happy people celebrating new beginnings. I didn’t want anything to intrude on my misery. Looking back, I realize that wasn’t a very healthy or productive way to handle things.
Last Christmas, when I had long ago shaken off the shackles of grief and rejoined the human race, I started thinking about how a young woman might cope with being alone on Christmas Eve in a city far from friends and family. What would she do instead of isolating herself from the human race as I had? I started writing. The result was the short story, Abigail’s Christmas. Abigail was much smarter than I was. She knew that it was important in life to keep going. And to accept the unexpected as a gift.
Abigail’s Christmas was awarded Four Hearts by Sizzling Book Reviews!
“Abigail’s Christmas is a sweet and special story that honors both love and the holidays.”
Read the full review……
Buy Blair’s books at The Memory of Roses Web Page, and Abigail’s Christmas Web Page.
About Blair McDowell
I started to write soon after I found my first pencil. But I began to write for publication about 30 years ago--professional books. I wrote six of them, all still in print and still in use. Only lately have I turned to fiction. I'd have done it a lot sooner if I'd had any idea how much fun it was!
I’ve lived in many different places. The US--Certain cities call to me. I love San Francisco and Seattle and the wonderful Oregon Coast. Australia--among the most open welcoming people in the world, and a wide open young country with incredible land and sea scapes, with amazing animal and bird life right out of science fiction. Canada--HOME. The place where I belong.
My books--I'd LOVE to tell you about them.
• The Memory of Roses--women's fiction --two generations, father and daughter each find love on the Greek island of Corfu. Brit is left a villa on Corfu and a family mystery to resolve. My love of Greece shines through every page.
• Delighting in Your Company is a paranormal Romance with time travel--set in the Caribbean of today and of the 1890's. Amalie Ansett is visiting the Island of St. Clement's and meets a handsome young planter--trouble is he died 200 years ago under mysterious circumstances. It's up to Amalie to help him.
• Sonata, placed in Vancouver and on the Sunshine Coast of BC. Sayuri McAllister is a world class concert artist with a Vancouver cop boyfriend. The story involves a jewel heist, attempted murder and general mayhem.
I travel a lot. I usually spend the month of October in Europe, Greece or Italy, and the winter in a little house I built many years ago on a small untouristic Caribbean Island. I have worked and studied in many places--Hungary, Australia the US and Canada, and have spoken in most of the States and Provinces as well as Taiwan and various cities in Europe. I enjoy being surrounded by cultures other than my own. I enjoy my own as well--but variety is indeed the spice of my life.
I keep busy--and I love my life. I love meeting the people who come here to the west coast of Canada and stay in my B&B. I love traveling after the tourist season is over. And I love writing. My interests?? Music, especially opera, reading everything in print, and Writing. And walking on the beach and swimming. At one point I had hoped to swim in every major sea and ocean. I've realized that may not be possible in one lifetime--but trying has been fun!
