I’d gotten used to celebrating Christmas in July, since that’s the month we start putting together stories for our November/December issue of ANGELS ON EARTH and our December issue of GUIDEPOSTS.
But this year, for the second year in a row, GUIDEPOSTS will also offer a special full-sized keepsake Christmas edition called The Joys of Christmas 2010. That’s a lot of Christmas material to find and prepare and photograph and illustrate, etc. Three publications’ worth!
We wanted to get a head start on the special edition, so that’s what we focused on at this morning’s editorial meeting. But Christmas in April? I’m still cleaning up stray pieces of grass from our Easter baskets and finding well hidden plastic eggs in the yard (better if I find them before the lawn mower does).
We went around the roomful of editors, each one pitching stories with a Christmas theme. One beautiful true story after another until I didn’t give a hoot whether it was April or July or December, for that matter. And, much to my delight, we heard so many stories about angels, we decided these heavenly beings would be one of the Christmas joys we’d celebrate in the 2010 special edition! (If you ask me, angels make anything extra special.)
Halfway through the meeting, I could have kicked myself for not baking a plateful of Christmas cookies to share. Like Ann Marie Manahan’s easy oatmeal cookie recipe featured in The Joys of Christmas 2009. Ann Marie bakes out of Morristown, NJ, with her seven-year-old daughter, Madeleine. Last year, with the help of their town, they sent 25,000 cookies to troops stationed in Iraq. Talk about spreading Christmas joy.
How can it ever be too early to get in the spirit? Or to be an angel.
—–
Find more All About Angels blog posts.
Colleen Hughes is the editor-in-chief of ANGELS ON EARTH magazine, a GUIDEPOSTS publication. She’s been at GUIDEPOSTS for 20 plus years, and lives in a Hudson River town with her two daughters and two cats.
