Sharing another heart-warming story in
 A Stone Mountain Christmas

 from Gilded Dragonfly Books. 

If you can relate to teen angst, read on!

Christmas Rose

Nan Monroe

C

hristmas is light.

Christmas glows, shines, glistens, shimmers, and twinkles. Only fitting, some would say, for a festival meant to celebrate the birthday of the Light of the World. But even those who never darken the door of a church may be dazzled by Christmas light – the light that blazes in a profusion of colors, a light that can pass through the grayest soul and turn it into a rainbow.

Christmas light is the one thing I’m sentimental about. I say “thing” deliberately, because I make a point of not feeling overly warm and fuzzy about things. People are another matter. I can get very sentimental about people. Not many people, just a few. A handful. And they’re all bound up somehow with Christmas light.

This is about one of them.

***

All the Christmases of my childhood can be boiled down to one. I was eight years old, and my dad decided the time had come to replace our artificial tree with a real one. Dad was the light master. He would string and re-string lights onto that fake tree in his quest for the perfect configuration of colors. I could barely see the tree for all the lights he draped over and around it. But at last the scraggly four-footer proved too small for his ambitions, and he came home with a lush six-foot-plus Virginia pine, a scented green canvas with sufficient breadth to suit the artist in him. My dad turned that tree into a blazing miracle.

Every morning those three weeks before Christmas, I would pull myself out of bed before sunrise, before my parents woke up, and creep into the living room where the tree stood. I’d plug in the electric cord and hold my breath a half-second as I watched that brilliance of color burst out to repaint the room. Light would flood every corner, so that nothing in my sight range was commonplace. I’d stand over the heat vent and stare at the tree and dream strange dreams, not about presents or about anything material and tangible, but about thoughts and feelings that existed only in that Christmas radiance. Of course an eight-year-old couldn’t make sense of it. Even today I struggle to find the words for it when I remember. But I know I’d never felt anything quite like it before and have seldom felt it since.

Another little thing about that Christmas that has stuck in my memory is an angel I made of cardboard and construction paper and glitter and glue, a school crafts project. It was the sort of cheesy ornament a kid can hand to her parents with a proud, toothy grin – well, maybe, if that kid is better at drawing straight lines and circles and figuring out how to get mileage out of a pair of blunt elementary-school scissors than I was. My angel looked like a refugee from Halloween Town in The Nightmare Before Christmas. My parents did what parents of third-graders do and posted it on the fridge and called it lovely. But even my eight-year-old mind could grasp the difference between my effort and the other kids’. My teacher called it avant garde, not a very fair phrase for a third grade teacher to use. I managed to look it up, so I knew she’d been fumbling for a compliment to pay me. It didn’t bother me much, for I didn’t aspire to an artist’s life. I was still in my wanna-be-an-astronaut phase.

I probably wouldn’t think much about that angel now if I hadn’t met Rose Coleman much later.

My childhood rolled on, with every Christmas much the same – the big Virginia pine, the blaze of light and color, the standing over the heat vent in the darkness before dawn to admire the way the tree glimmered when all other light was turned off, the swell of emotion I could only describe as “Christmas.” Then came the year things changed, the year of “your mom and dad can’t live together anymore but we both love you.” I was fifteen.

If you want to learn how Rose deals, read the rest at Amazon.com

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https://www.facebook.com/nanmonroeauthor

Anthologies and Short Stories
 
Short stories are finding homes in anthologies more and more these days. You remember short stories, don't you? You read them in literature classes. Many writers have a few on their computers and under their beds. Maybe you have one lurking on a closet shelf or in a file cabinet.  

Well, I do, too, and I plan to join the Indie authors who have put them up on Amazon and made money with them or offered them as free reads.  When I became an editor for Gilded Dragonfly Books I wrote a story for our anthology. The anthology has 9 stories that will capture your imagination and make you think.

In north Georgia there is an amusement park called Dancing Dragonfly Amusement park.
And in that park there is a magic carousel, Carousel Déjà Vu by name. 
And if you ride that carousel, you should reach for the brass ring.
And if you catch that ring... 

You didn't think I would tell all, did you?

Jackson Nighttraveller chooses people he thinks need to ride his carousel, and Dr. Alice is one of the nine riders in our anthology, Carousel Déjà Vu. 

    
Dr. Alice’s Ride
by Mary Marvella

Dr. Alice Compton couldn’t think of one reason she had stopped here this March afternoon, to sit alone on this bench across the way from Dancing Dragonfly Amusement park. Well, maybe one. She and her family had loved this amusement park when the kids were smaller. They had laughed and eaten their share of cotton candy and hotdogs. They had ridden the Déjà vu carousel and other rides and had enjoyed each other and cherished life. Her teenaged kids and her busy husband never wanted to come here anymore. She wouldn’t even be here today if they’d answered their cell phones this afternoon. Mack’s text that he would be working late had prompted her to send several angry responses. She needed her family, damn it! She sniffed, then swallowed hard.
 
Some force had drawn her out of her way and made her stop here on the way home from the hospital in south Gainesville.  Why today, of all days, hadn’t she gone straight home? A sob ripped through her throat as a part of her heart tore off. Little Lila Jones had never ridden a carousel or eaten hotdogs, and now she never would.

Do  you think Alice needs to ride? Are there days you might want a do-over?