By John Gilstrap

It will come as no surprise to anyone who has known me for more than a minute or two that I am a social creature. I am a Type-A extrovert all the way–ENTP for you Myers-Briggs afficionados. There’s nothing I enjoy more than a good party. Which is why, beyond the glorious religious reasons, the Christmas season is the highlight of my year. We love to host parties. In fact, when we designed our stone cabin in the woods, we included extra wide hallways specifically for the purpose of accommodating large-scale parties.

This past weekend, on December 7, was the annual big one for local folks, about 70 people in all. It’s our Christmas present to each other, so the whole thing is catered, complete with open bar and valet parking. (The valet parking is necessary because it gets REALLY dark out here, and parking is in a field.) Thanks to my involvement with the local radio station, we’ve gotten to know far more local people in the two and a half years we’ve been West Virginians than we met in our lifetimes outside Washington, from down-the-street neighbors to politicians to judges and prosecutors. Kurt and Annie Muse (subjects and co-author of Six Minutes to Freedom) were able to join us as well.

On December 14th, there’ll be another party for 16 people, for which I’ll do the cooking, though I’m not yet sure what we’ll have. Soft plans are forming for a y’all come open house event on December 22 for the broad spectrum of friends from today and yesteryear–firehouse buds, high school and college friends and old neighbors. If it happens (I guess we really need to decide), that get-together will be the very definition of informal–think pizza, sides and maybe burgers if the weather is nice enough.

Then, on December 27, we’ll host the daylight version of the extended family party that used to be a Christmas evening party before we moved to West Virginia. (Did I mention it gets dark out here at night? Apparently, Washingtonians’ retinal rods and cones don’t function without the assistance of street lights.) Cooking assignments for this party were established decades ago. Barbie brings the apple pie (actually she’s not allowed to cross the threshold without it), Nan brings her cheesy grits, Jim brings cranberry relish, Donna brings sugar cookies (another prerequisite for entry), and I bring the old school green bean casserole that everyone makes fun of but somehow manages to choke down without leaving leftovers.

With all the entertaining, this is my season for extravagant decoration. I’ve been told that my Holiday decorating aesthetic is best described as “hotel lobby.” He who said that was not being entirely complimentary, but he may have had a point. For this one annual slice of time, more is more, right? For one-twelfth of every year, we turn what I think is a fairly staid, conservatively outfitted home into our wonderland. I have regular late-summer nightmares about having missed the holiday decorating season. I hope we do it without tipping into tacky, but if there’s ever a season when you get get away with crossing that line, I think this is it.

Because of a very sad story that happened when I was young, and then was reinforced through many years in the fire service, we don’t put up any real Christmas trees. I don’t even allow any real greens near a fireplace or a candle (it was a VERY sad story when I was young). So, we do artificial trees, the technology for which has seen amazing advances year over year. Remember “more is more?” I confess I have a self control problem, however, when it comes to Christmas trees. We have six of them this year. I already know where I want to put the 7th next year.

Of the six trees, though, only one is the true Christmas tree for the house, and it’s the one in what we call the family room. This is the one that is, quite frankly, the most boring to look at, but it’s the one that I’ll sneak down at night to look at to bring peace to my soul. Here, you’ll find the God-awful (priceless) toilet paper dowel wrapped in crepe paper made by our son in kindergarten in 1989. You’ll find the ornaments bought on every family vacation, and Bernard and Bianca from “The Rescuers Down Under” (1990), who must always be holding hands. Even a few nicotine-stained Shiny-Brite glass ornaments from my youth remain intact. One stocking over the mantle reads “Johnny” and it was handmade by my Mom-Mom when I was an infant. When our son Chris was born in 1986, I transferred the two silver dollars my Uncle Henny gave to me when I was 5 or 6 years old from the toe of my stocking to the toe of his.

The book tree in the library is the newest addition to the collection. It is by far the most self-indulgent (and self-congratulatory) of the decorations, and I won’t even pretend that there was an effort at subtlety. Much of the detail was lost in the formatting to blogger, but in addition to a few regular ornaments, the branches of the tree are decorated with open and closed editions of my various books. The dangling yellow bits are bookmarks I had made for Zero Sum. We used a standard hole punch near the top to make room for a standard ornament hanger. Finally, instead of a tree skirt, we scattered more books around the base of the tree stand. At last, a practical use for all those author’s copies that have been gathering dust in the basement!

One of the great pleasures of designing your home from scratch is that you get to design it to your own lifestyle. This is Joy’s and my fifth house since we’ve been married, and each previous iteration came burdened with a space called a “living room” which went entirely unlived in. So, for our dream home, upon entering the foyer a glance to the right reveals the “tavern.” (Hey, I’m Irish. Gimme a break.)

Next to the back porch during 8 months of the year, the tavern is probably the room we use more than any other, and not just for the bar–though for that, too.

Of course, a tavern Christmas tree must have special ornaments. When I went to the liquor store and told the clerk why I was buying a couple dozen airline-size bottles of a variety of boozes, she really got into it. Wrap some ribbons around the necks and voila! You’ve got a tree bauble, to which we added more than a few used wine corks. For the record, that tiny bottle you see is the only bit of Jägermeister to be found in our house. I am confident that anyone who has ever been among the last to leave a bar will agree that in the history of time, nothing good has ever happened after the Jägermeister came out.

If you’ve read this far, it is entirely reasonable to ask what does any of this have to do with writing? Well, I’ll tell you: This being December 10th, I owe a short story to an anthology by December 15th, and I’ve been having trouble carving out the time to get it done. It seems like deadlines are a constant in my life, and somehow, I always meet them. But Christmas comes but once a year.

Killzone family, this is my last post before we hit our end-of year hiatus, so let me take this opportunity to wish you the very best for this holiday season and the coming year. May every challenge be surmountable! See you on the flip in ’25!

During the downtime between book deadlines, I’ve been able to catch up on my reading. As many writers can attest, when you’re writing you want to read, and when you’re reading it’s easy to wish you were writing.

Not to say I haven’t been dabbling with the next manuscript, trying to reach that acceleration point where the process takes over, but with the holidays, it’s slow. Oh, I’m getting five pages a day, but they haven’t sparked yet.

So for inspiration, I picked up an old favorite off one of the shelves behind my desk. It was Larry McMurtry’s The Last Picture Show, a book that should be required reading for all future Texan authors. It’s not a long novel, and I finished it in one blustery afternoon when I couldn’t force myself into going outside. Putting it back, my fingers brushed Texasville, and I was away on another adventure with his character Duane Moore in Thalia, Texas.

After finishing all five books in that saga, my appetite for McMurtry wasn’t sated. I considered his Lonesome Dove books, but decided to read some of his more contemporary novels , and that’s when tragedy struck.

See, I’m a collector. When I find an author I can’t put down, I’ll search out all their works in first edition, and I’ve been a McMurtry fan since reading All My Friends are Going to be Strangers back in high school. I have them all, and went to find the next one. But I hadn’t put them order since we had the new bookcases put in. When the Bride and I bought this new house, we hired a craftsman to install my dream shelves that now groan under the weight of bound worlds.

Once the cabinetmake finished, and my librarian daughter quit climbing the ladder and rolling back and forth on the rail, and we simply unloaded all the books from the boxes, putting them only in author order, and I’ve never gone back and sorted them.

“Good lord!”

The Bride wandered into my office a few minutes later, unimpressed by my outburst. “What have you done now?”

“I’m missing a McMurtry.”

“Are you sure?”

I blinked at her for a long moment. “Of course I’m sure. I’m standing here on the ladder, looking at all the titles and In a Narrow Grave isn’t here.”

“You sure you had that one?”

“What’s with the interrogation? I remember all my books, and the day I picked that one up from a bargain bin long before we met. It was one of those little bookstores that just bought books and stacked them around.” I momentarily drifted away. “What a wonderful store.”

“Go buy another one.”

I shook my head “This was a first edition.”

“So?”

“The last one I saw was somewhere around eight hundred dollars.”

“Well, you need to find that one.”

We searched high and low. It wasn’t mis-shelved, or behind other books. It was simply gone. I might have lost it in one of the several moves over the years, but I swear I remember seeing it on the shelf in our previous house.

But then another lightning bolt struck as I put the remainder of McMurtry’s works in order. “Good lord!”

“Really?” She wandered back in. “What now?”

“The Late Child and Somebody’s Darling are gone too!”

Que the mystery music. Dum, dum, dum.

As the camera moves in, we exchanged perplexed expressions, and then understanding dawned.

I felt faint and placed both palms against my cheeks. “Someone’s borrowed them!!!”

Her eyes widened. “Without asking!!!”

I’m sure the Bride would have taken to the fainting couch, if we had one.

“Hannah!” The name unconsciously slipped out.

The Bride shook her head at the mention of our youngest daughter’s best friend. I like to blame her for many incidents and accidents through the years from the time they were children, but the Bride yanked me back. “She’s off the hook. She doesn’t read.”

I struggled with her statement “Hannah asked me for a recommendation one time, when she was in middle school. I might have given her a book, and I doubt she ever brought it back. Maybe she likes odd numbers and took two more.”

“You wouldn’t have given her either one of those.”

“You’re right.” I struggled with the enormity of what we faced. Someone borrowed two prized possessions. Why didn’t they take the dog instead, or one of the girls? At least they would have wandered back home at some point.”

“Burglars,” I wondered aloud. “Maybe there’s some hot, black market for those two volumes.”

I don’t own a lending library. I’d learned my lesson decades earlier when I loaned my complete collection of William Jose Farmer’s World of Tiers series to a good friend who loved to read. We shared many fine hours talking books and authors, until he betrayed me. He finished those first editions and ––– gave them to someone else.

“I didn’t know you wanted them back,” he answered, perplexed when I asked for them back.

They’re as gone as the Library of Alexandria.

Today there’s only three people who are on the Loan List, and two of them have their own McMurtry collections. (I wonder if they completed those by borrowing mine…nah.)

Pouring two fingers of Buffalo Trace to settle my nerves and a great sense of loss, I resumed arranging my entire library, which took some time, leaving space on the shelf to replace those missing volumes.

Now the search begins to find quality first edition replacements. It will be a hard, bitter road, but the sense of anticipation, and then joy of discovery, is something to look forward to.

So if you’re considering a Christmas present for me, you now have an idea.

With that, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to you all. Good luck to the writers, and happy reading to those who enjoy settling in with a good book.