How to get ready for Christmas

My foolproof guide to getting your sh1t together for the holidays

I’m really good at Christmas. Like REALLY good. I thought I’d share all my best tips with you to help you be as awesome as I am and then we can all be smug and perfect together, like some kind of endlessly looping Spend The Day With Me Instagram reel made by the wife of a money launderer.

1. Move house, have a baby, or both!

First one on the list is key. It’s been a while since I could follow this advice, but I really nailed it in 2009, when I moved house at the end of November and gave birth a week later (eight days early). If you’re thinking of having a baby, I really suggest you just go ahead and combine it with moving house. Even better, invite a load of your family to stay so they can sit on your bare dirty floorboards and shiver in front of a faulty heating system and you can sit on the stairs and cry.

Those curtains stayed up for about another five years

We didn’t have a baby in 2020, but we DID move during a lockdown. Christmas was cancelled, which was a real shame because we hadn’t unpacked and we’d invited a whole other load of family and the central heating was once again faulty, so that was a real missed opportunity for crying on the stairs there.

Note the colander on the left hand side by the fireplace, which is precisely the right home for a kitchen utensil

2. Embark on a building project

Every year, usually around October or November, I get these brilliant ideas of home improvement projects we can do before Christmas. One year I sent Alex to collect a range cooker off the side of the road. It sat in our kitchen for at least a year, but just before Christmas, I thought it would be the perfect time to get a builder to knock a hole in our chimney breast and install it. Thankfully, the builder didn't remove the back wall or lift up the floor until January, so we got to enjoy staring at an unconnected range while Alex produced Christmas dinner on the old cooker, but at least we weren’t freezing this time.

In 2022, I bought a secondhand kitchen off Used Kitchen Exchange and then tried to convince someone to fit it before Christmas. It almost worked, too! And it was really fun trying to climb around the new kitchen cupboards to get to the old ones.

Days before Christmas. Look at this festive scene!

In 2022, we kept it simple by ripping out a bathroom and covering everything we owned with building rubble. This year, we have done the same but with a different bathroom. It’s great. The laundry is covered in a festive layer of lime plaster.

3. Have a really good tidy-up

Just before Christmas is the perfect time to get the house really tidy. This is my foolproof tidying method:

1. Start with the messiest cupboards.

2. Take everything out of them so you can really sort through the things you’ve forgotten you own and the other things that might come in useful one day.

3. Consider moving your kids’ rooms around. It’s the perfect time to decide your daughter needs to move out of her room with mould in and move into the room where you usually hide all the crap. All you have to do is swap her crap with the other crap and you’re done! Easy peasy.

4. Put it all in the landings.

5. Have a sherry and/or snowball.

6. Shout at the children for not helping.

7. Cry on the stairs.

If possible, combine this with a building project. Here is a video from 2022 that shows what my house looked like on 22 December. I’m very proud to say, this is also what my house looked like last year, and we’ve done it again this year, too! Consistency is key.

shinykatie

A post shared by @shinykatie

I’m thinking I may have time to clear out the loft, what do you reckon?

4. Make a last-minute decision to launch your book a month earlier

If you look at your schedules and make realistic choices about when you can get your final edit done, and how quickly you can get out your Advance Review Copies to your ARC readers, I highly recommend ignoring all that and just thinking, “Ah, what the hell, let’s just get it released the first week in January! What could possibly go wrong?¹”

That way, you too can spend the weeks before Christmas frantically seeking typos and trying to work out how wide the spine needs to be on your print edition.

Pre-order your copy of The Man In The Wall, out 3rd January!

So, yeah, that’s what I’ve done. The Man In the Wall by my crime-writing alter-ego, KJ Lyttleton², is now available for pre-order. You can order your copy here. I really hope I’ll have found all the typos before 28th December, which is my final deadline for getting it all completed ahead of release on 3rd January 2025.

Lend me your algorithms

If you are a regular crime reader, I would especially appreciate your algorithm juices. I’ve been a bit of a wally by letting all my friends know about The Man In The Wall already.

I got a bit carried away. Doesn’t sound like me, does it?

You’re NOT MEANT TO DO THAT.

Rumour has it, there’s a very good chance that Amazon will send me to Algorithm Azkaban for first selling my book to people who wouldn’t normally read crime books³, but who are obviously buying out of a sense of obligation. It’s like they know or something.

I hope you can detect the whiff of scepticism about me. It’s not that I don’t believe Amazon looks carefully at buying choices. I mean, that’s one of their favourite pastimes, isn’t it? It’s just that I think we can all-too-easily end up like superstitious pigeons⁴ making wild dances in front of the random “feed me” button in the belief that we have any control over any of it.

Also, if I’m not allowed to use the “Guilt your friends and family into purchasing your thing” school of marketing, then what is the point in anything?

5. Don’t worry about it

Anyway, I’ve told everyone now, so it’s too late. But don’t worry, just as everything will be tidy by Christmas, even if we will still have a hole where the bathroom used to be and I will have ruined the stairs with my salty tears and snowball spills, I’m sure The Man In the Wall will find its audience eventually. If not, we can turn our attention to Maz Star: A Massive Inconvenience and hide The Man In The Wall in the Room of Doom with the rest of the crap.

So that’s it! My foolproof guide to a stress-free, Instagram-ready Christmas! Please do leave me a comment with your own tips for a happy holiday season.

In 72 hours that blurb will be very slightly different.

If you would like to – of your own volition and with absolutely no sense of obligation – pre-order my book, I’d be chuffed as monkeys. Let me furnish you with that link again.

x Katie (aka KJ Lyttleton)

PS. If you would like to be considered for a free ARC copy⁵ and (I guess I should be sensible and say) regularly read crime, please fill in this form.⁶

1. The first thing that went wrong is that I misspelled Lyttleton on the listing and the second thing was I accidentally made it suitable for only 13-18-yr-olds. Then I had to wait 72 hours for Amazon to update the listing. Brilliant.

2. Name to be explained at a later date. (And if the promise of a future post about the etymology of a pen name isn’t enticing, I don’t know what is.)

3. Consider that next time you decide to try a new genre. Turns out, your crazy whim might be tanking your favourite new author’s Amazon search ranking. Reckless!

4. Apparently, like most fun and famous studies, the Skinner’s Superstitious Pigeons' study has been called into question, notably by Justice and Looney, whose names I am going to steal immediately and pitch to my screen agent as a new ITV Crime drama.)

5. Tautology klaxon!

6. I really hope you know you can hover over footnotes and they pop up magically in the app, or click on them in the email without having to scroll. If not, soz.