The Most Wonderful time of...Mistakes, by MJ Schiller

Christmas time. It’s the most wonderful time of the year, right? And the most hectic. And hectic can sometimes lead to mistakes, at least in my book. We’re all running around so distracted, marking off things on our lists—shopping, cooking, cleaning, parties… We’re taken out of the moment, and those kinds of distractions can cause missteps. We see more frequent fender benders. Experience more times we forget appointments. Leave credit cards on counters. Leave purses, gloves, sunglasses behind. Any of this hitting home for you? As frustrating as this can be, I thought I’d recount for you all a few memorable mistakes from my Christmases past and then we can determine whether they are the kinds of errors that bring down the curtains on a Christmas pageant, or simply make for some backstage chaos.

One year, when our triplets were young—two or three—we had Christmas at my mom’s. We hid the presents in her basement, which seemed like a good idea, until all four of my kids had trundled off to bed and I could only find three of the four Beanie Babies for their stockings. (You remember those cute little Beanie guys, don’t you?) So what do you do? You hope a letter from good ol’ St. Nick will be enough of a novelty to forestall the impending tears. Santa told Mitch that he was sorry, but he thought maybe he’d dropped his Beanie out of the sleigh. Weeks later, my mom found it and mailed it to us. It came on a rainy day, and when I read the note from “Santa” it said that his panther had fallen out over the ocean and had gotten a tad wet. Boy, if that didn’t solidify the authenticity of the jolly old fellow.

Then there was the year that we asked my niece, Maddie, to pen the letter from Santa, so the kids wouldn’t recognize our handwriting. It was the Christmas we had gotten them a basketball hoop for the driveway and the note told them to look outside. Worked well until we realized that my niece had written it on the soft pine table, with nothing under it, so that letter could be read for years to come, pressed into the wood.

And when I was a child, one year my little sister and I discovered our Barbie townhouse in a wardrobe box in the basement. Whoops! That really called the whole North Pole crew into question when the townhouse came from “Ho-Ho-Ho.” And one year I snuck all of my presents one by one into the bathroom, carefully unwrapped them, then rewrapped them and returned them to the tree. It made for a pretty anticlimactic Christmas morning. “Oh, yeah. This is the purple sweater.” “This is the skirt.” *yawn* (I don’t recommend doing that, by the way.)

But despite all the Christmases that didn’t go quite as planned, the blunders still made for some nice stories for us to pull out each year—like ornaments for the tree—and they bring laughter and warmth. This holiday will probably not be pulled off seamlessly. Like a wedding, or any big production, there’s bound to be something off-kilter somewhere along the line. But that’s okay. It’s the being together that’s important. And any foul ups will be retold in years to come with love and humor.

Now, you’d think that a woman with over 30 books available to purchase would have at least a handful of Christmas stories, wouldn’t you? Especially someone like me, who loves Christmas. But I don’t. I have just the one romantic suspense, UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR. So as things begin to slow down here, be sure and treat yourself to some quiet moments. Just you, a book, some hot chocolate, and a little Christmas…murder?

Dylan Fisher is an EMT and part-time Santa Claus at a mall in Denver, Colorado.

He has logged plenty of time with children sitting on his lap asking for anything from the latest electronic gadget to a week’s worth of homework passes, but he never heard anyone ask for what little Delaney Kelly asked for on one snowy night in December. A dad! When Dylan’s eyes search the crowd for Delaney’s mother and land on Keira Kelly, the paramedic almost finds himself in need of a little CPR. She is stunning.

Keira Kelly is still grieving over the loss of her husband…

… but a reckless driver has her thinking about nothing but survival as she’s headed home from the mall. When Keira wakes in the hospital to find a hunky EMT at her bedside, she begins having a few thoughts that would put her on Santa’s Naughty List for sure.

Neither is ready for what is coming UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR.

When she finds out the EMT is only hanging around because the police believe someone is out to get her, she’s not sure what to think about his kindness. Is he helping her because he wants to, or because he feels he needs to? And what about the man who rammed her car, could he have had something to do with her husband’s death?

Thanks for reading, and may you and your family have a wonderful, quirky Christmas and many more to come!

Bestselling author M.J. Schiller is a retired lunch lady/romance-romantic suspense writer. She enjoys writing novels whose characters include rock stars, desert princes, teachers, futuristic Knights, construction workers, cops, and a wide variety of others. In her mind everybody has a romance. She is the mother of a twenty-six-year-old and three twenty-four- year-olds. That's right, triplets! She likes to escape from life on occasion by pretending to be
a rock star at karaoke. However…you won’t be seeing her name on any record labels soon.

(To purchase UPON A MIDNIGHT CLEAR, click here: https://books2read.com/Upon-A-Midnight-Clear Only 99 cents!)

To find other M.J. Schiller books, click here: https://www.amazon.com/stores/M.J.-Schiller/author/B009JOQFQQ

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