Friday 8 December 2017

Let's Get Christmassy with... Liz Taylorson



We’re getting festive here with some special peeps and today we get Christmassy with
  Liz Taylorson


Hello Liz




Please tell us a little about you and if you are a reader, Blogger or author.



I’m a debut author, my first novel The Little Church by the Sea is a Christmas-set romantic women’s fiction novel and has just been published. Of course, I’m a reader too and Christmas novels have a special place in my heart – which is why I wrote one!

What is your favourite Christmas memory?

I remember one frosty Christmas Eve as a child walking home from church by the light of my Christingle candle (this was in the 1970s not the 1870s I should point out, though my children may attempt to convince you otherwise …) and seeing what my Mum told me was the Christmas star shining brightly above us in the sky. Magical. And then only a couple of years ago walking the same path on Christmas Eve with my husband and children, seeing a shooting star and remembering how I had watched the stars there with my own parents forty years before.

And then there was the year I cooked my first Christmas dinner and I let the sprout pan boil dry … I’ll never forget that smell!


What is your favourite Christmas food?

Not sprouts [shudder!].

Cinnamon toast is my favourite, another special childhood memory. I must have been about 11 or 12 and I remember my parents taking me to Nunnington Hall, a National Trust property, for an afternoon of carols with hot chocolate and cinnamon toast in front of a blazing fire. You can keep your mince pies and Christmas pudding – nothing tastes like Christmas as much as cinnamon toast does. As soon as December arrives I’m warming up the grill!


What is your favourite Christmas song?
Sweet Chiming Bells. It’s one of the traditional Sheffield Carols, the verses have the same words as the carol While Shepherds watched, but it has a cracking chorus to join in with (“Sweet bells, sweet chiming Christmas bells … they cheer us on our heavenly way, sweet chiming bells”.) If you’ve never heard it, I would recommend Kate Rusby’s version (on her album Sweet Bells). It appears in my novel too, it’s sung in the pub with mulled wine and mince pies, as all the best Christmas songs should be.

What is your favourite Christmas photo? Please tell us why



Well, I’ve got lots of lovely pictures of my children when they were little opening and playing with Christmas presents … but they didn’t want me to share them. It makes them cringe, apparently. So I’m going with a photograph that my sister-in-law Angela Harrison took, which is part of the ideal Christmas in my imagination. It’s taken at Robin Hood’s Bay a seaside village in Yorkshire not entirely unlike the one where The Little Church by the Sea is set. Robin Hood’s Bay has an annual Victorian Christmas festival, and this little cottage, beautifully but simply decorated for Christmas, is just like the one lived in by my heroine, Cass.

You can Liz at all these places...
Twitter: @taylorson_liz
Facebook: @TaylorsonLiz



Please come back tomorrow to find out what makes Vivien Hampshire Christmas Christmassy

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