Sunday Chat: Winter weather, Christmas events, Christmas movies, and a dud mystery book

/ Lisa R. Howeler

Welcome to my Sunday Chat where I ramble about what’s been going on in my world, what the rest of the family and I have been reading, watching, listening to, and what I’ve been writing.

This week I’m joining up with Kimba at Caffeinated Reviewer, Deb at Readerbuzz, and Kathyrn at The Book Date.

It is hard for me to explain to people from larger, more urban areas just how small the little town I live in is. Sometimes numbers help – there are about 400 people in my town, 6,000 total in the entire county, and then in the summer the numbers go up some as visitors from the city come up to stay in cabins in the county. There is one elementary school and one high school for the entire county and it’s all located in one town – which is the county seat.

When there are events in our tiny town it’s not always very exciting and there isn’t always a lot to see, but the organizations and business owners try their best.

Yesterday there was a book sale at the local library for the town Christmas festival, and I went but was a bit disappointed in the selection this year. It was not their fault at all – there just wasn’t a lot of books that interested me this time around — yet I somehow still managed to come home with about 11.

There was also a strange but sort of funny exchange with the library director before I left about library bags and if I wanted one. I think I was misunderstanding the man but when he put the books I bought in a bag he said something about how they usually only use those bags for library books when they are taken out. He said they had boxes for people to carry books in from the sale. I asked him if he wanted me to take a box instead and he said, “Oh, no, we should be good with bags right now. We just got an order of 400 in.”

If they just got 400 in I’m not sure why he was telling me they don’t usually use the books for the sale, but thinking back, maybe he was simply sharing about how they don’t usually use them but decided to on that day because they had just received an order for them. I have no idea but I have to admit that later in the day I felt guilty that I had taken one of their bags. Yes, those are the kind of thoughts that pop into my mind when other people wouldn’t have given it a second thought the rest of the day.

I was very excited to find a copy of The Thursday Murder Club by Richard Osman since I have been interested in reading that for a while now.

I also picked up a copy of The Scarlet Pimpernel, which I have wanted to read after seeing a movie based on it years ago.

Jimmy Stewart and His Poems is a book I’ll have fun reading this winter, I think. It shouldn’t take me long. It’s very short.

I also picked up two mass-market editions of The Two Towers and The Return of the King from the Lord of the Rings trilogy so I can easily slide The Two Towers in my purse when I start to read it later this winter.

The “winter festival” is capped off by a very short, very cold Christmas parade each year. The “festival” was supposed to feature vendors and S’mores stations but there ended up being one tiny S’mores station and no craft vendors — unless they were tucked away in one of the other buildings in town.

We skipped the parade because we tried to go to it two years ago and it was so cold that I couldn’t feel my fingers. I also couldn’t breathe because the cold triggered my asthma – or whatever it is I have that makes breathing in the cold very difficult for me.

Last week our temps were in the low 50s one day and next week will be the same but yesterday our high was 30 and it was in the low 20s when it was time for the parade.

No, thank you.

We are down to one car right now so we don’t go many places during the week but on Fridays Little Miss and I travel to get groceries. With the weather being so cold we don’t do much other than pick up our pick up order and come back  home, stopping at my parents on the way through to drop off a few groceries we pick up for them.

We did that this Friday, and it was a fairly uneventful trip. We were glad to get back to the house and enjoy the fire in the woodstove and the Christmas tree we decorated a couple of weeks ago.

I’m really hoping to sit by that tree and read a Christmas short story or two later this week.

Our upcoming homeschooling week is going to be fairly laid back with Christmas-themed crafts and baking and vintage Christmas stories heavily mixed into regular, scaled-back lessons.

This week I finished Death Comes to Marlow by Robert Thorogood and was very disappointed in it. It was repetitive and dragged quite a bit. I had high hopes for it and thought I might continue the series but now I am not so sure.

I continued The Hound of The Baskerville’s by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle and will most likely finish it this week.

I abandoned one of my planned Christmas reads because it was deeply depressing. Instead, I continued to read Christy by Catherine Marshall, which I am borrowing on my Kindle through Libby.

I might sneak in a last Christmas novella, The Christmas Swap by Melody Carlson, before Christmas. I’ll see if I make it that far since I am also in the middle of making corrections to Gladwynn Grant Shakes the Family Tree (releasing sometime in early 2025).

Little Miss hasn’t been reading much of Harry Potter, but I figure she will pick it up again later this week. The Boy is listening to The Hound of the Baskerville’s for English/British Literature.

I forgot to ask The Husband what he is reading but I know he’s read 113 books this year.

This past week I watched two Hallmark movies and then an older Hallmark movie that is one of the best ones I’ve ever seen — Trading Christmas (I wrote about it in this post from last year.)

We also watched a classic Christmas with Garfield from the 1980s and half of A Miracle on 34th Street, which we will hopefully finish tonight.

This week I hope to watch The Christmas Candle this week and other Christmas-related shows or movies.

I am currently working on edits to Gladwynn Grant Shakes The Family Tree. I hate edits – or fixing the manuscript after it’s been given back to me by editors and beta readers. It’s so tedious. But once it is done, I’ll be able to release the book and add it to the other two.

This week on the blog I shared:

|| Little Lord Fauntleroy Marathon by Cat’s Wire ||

|| A Fall Hike in Turkey Run State Park by Amy’s Creative Pursuits ||

|| Gingerbread Candy Kitchen and Hutch by Debbie Dabble Christmas ||

|| Peace on Earth, Second Sunday of Advent by Big Sky Buckeye ||

Don’t forget that Erin and I are hosting the Comfy, Cozy Christmas link-up, which you can find at the top of the page. The link-up is for any holiday-related posts.

Now it’s your turn!

What have you been doing, watching, reading, listening to or writing? Let me know in the comments or leave a blog post link if you also write a weekly update like this.

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27 thoughts on “Sunday Chat: Winter weather, Christmas events, Christmas movies, and a dud mystery book”

  1. Pingback: Sunday Chat: Merry Christmas, Christmas movies, and looks like we will have a white Christmas afterall – Boondock Ramblings

  2. When I was 14, we went to visit my great grandmother. She lived in a small town in Kansas with about 500 people. Coming from Los Angeles, it was quite the novelty. I thought it was so peaceful.

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  3. In 2020 at the onset of Covid, we moved from a city of a couple of million people to a small town of about 5000.
    We did grow up here, so it’s not a total culture shock, but the first year was a challenge. Now we are settled in and love that we are walking distance to wild spaces.

    Our library is connected to a larger system so finding books hasn’t been an issue.

    I hope you end up loving The Thursday Murder Club as much as I did!

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  4. When I was working, I lived in two different small towns. The first has 700 people the second has 2000 people. The first actually had a more vibrant downtown and library than the second which was a bedroom community for a nearby large town. Come see my week here. Happy reading!

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  6. I would love for my area to be that small! At one time it was significantly smaller but STL county started encroaching on our area when they figured out it’s much cheaper to live here and you can still get to anywhere in the city or county in an hour or less.

    What a great haul from the library sale!

    I’ve not been in a tv watching mood but I keep up with Ghosts. I think that show is hilarious.

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  8. I can’t even begin to imagine living in a town that small! It’s even hard to imagine being that cold!

    I enjoyed The Thursday Murder Club, and as soon as I saw the title for The Scarlet Pimpernel I couldn’t help but recite the little catchphrase – They seek him here, they seek him there Those Frenchies seek him everywhere Is he in heaven or is he in hell? That demned elusive Pimpernel

    Have a great week!

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  9. You know, other than the shopping, living in a town that small sounds quite nice. My hometown was around 4,000 or 5,000 for most of my life. It kinda took off the last decade or so we lived there. I could go to WalMart and not see a single soul I knew. That’s sad when you consider I grew up there.

    The town we live in now is a bedroom community of well over 20,000. It’s hard to get to know people who have lived in a place their entire lives when you’re my age. The town does have Christmas events as well as farmers markets (in the summer). I never go to either because there is a serious dearth of parking.

    We have been watching the Harry Potter Baking Show which has been fun. It’s filmed on the sets from the movie. I told Mike I’d love to go to Florida just to visit the Harry Potter amusement park there…I don’t even know its name. I’m almost finished with the book I’m currently reading…something like The First Lie Wins. It’s been full of twists and turns. I actually really like it so I’ll look for more books by this author.

    Have a wonderful week, Lisa!

    https://marshainthemiddle.com/

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    • Yes, the shopping is not a very fun situation since we have to drive an hour either way to get to a bigger supermarket. We can find smaller ones about a half hour away luckily.

      The town I lived in for 18 years became larger and larger over time but I still seemed to find people in Walmart who knew me. It was probably about 5,000 in the three towns that ran together.

      You have a good week too.

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  10. 400 people!!!! Let me see how many people live in my neighborhood of Toluca Lake (20,465), which is in Los Angeles (3.821 million).

    How many were in my mom’s town, Cherokee Village, Arkansas? To me that was a small town. 4.936.

    Evening Shade, Arkansas has 430 people and I have driven through Evening Shade many times so now I have an idea of the size of where you live. And I love how excited small towns get over community events and celebrations. There’s always a church rummage sale or a Masonic Lodge fish fry or a a picnic or a carnival, festival, or a parade.

    And I also understand how the selection at the book sale isn’t that great but I’m glad you didn’t go home empty handed!

    I would’ve been all over that s’mores station!!!

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    • So Evening Shade is a real town? Is that where the show was based, I wonder? Interesting!

      And yes, the small town events can be a big deal but sometimes they seem to not do what they say they are going to do for these things. I wish we’d been able to go to the parade. I’m sure it would have been nice but my lungs just hate that cold!

      There are also a lot of bbq chicken sales here but now the chickens cost so much it’s almost not worth it to both sell them for fundraisers, or buy them.

      The kids made like three S’mores each.

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  11. I don’t think I realized how small in population your town and your county are. I grew up in what I considered a small town, with 5,000 people, and now I still think of our town as small, at 25,000. But Houston is steadily encroaching upon us. After the next census, we will probably have no country buffer left, sadly.

    I’ve been wanting to read The Thursday Murder Club. A copy of it appeared in my Little Free Library. I hope to read it next year.

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    • Yes, I won’t get to it until next year either.

      I swear this town had 600 when we moved here four years ago (moving during a pandemic was really, really fun) but when I looked it up yesterday it was 451. I think we drove the rest out or something. This county is made up of a lot of woodland, a good portion of it state gameland, which is why the population is so low, I guess. Our town has the only stoplight in the whole county, which is, according to Britannica.com: 450 square miles (1,165 square km) wide.

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  12. I just read Yours, Truly this weekend and really enjoyed it a lot. I don’t think I have ever read an Amish fictional love story but I do read the Kate Burkholder series that deal with murder mysteries in the Amish community.

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    • I actually just took that whole paragraph out because it sounded like I have bitter hatred for Amish romance or books and I don’t – they just aren’t my favorite and I don’t understand the fascination with them. 😂 I have read some good ones. I didn’t want to offend anyone who deeply loves them. 😬

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