EDGE: Are you more of a Santa or Scrooge?
Jerome Stueart: I'm a Santa. I like spreading joy. And I live right near a whole pack of caribou who would love to fly.... away from hunters. (I see you Sarah)
EDGE: Do you have anything unique or special thing you do to celebrate the holiday season?
Jerome Stueart: Call my folks on Skype. I always watch a few favorite Christmas movies: The Bishop's Wife, The Snowman (the animated one), and It's a Wonderful Life.
EDGE: What was the strangest Christmas/Hanukah/Yule/insert other celebration here gift you ever received?
Jerome Stueart: I got a Charlie McCarthy ventriloquist doll one year for Christmas--within hours, his mouth was stuck open from being talked through so much. It was a bad omen...
EDGE: What is your favorite holiday treat (sweet or otherwise)?
Jerome Stueart: Puppy Chow (aka White Trash): Rice chex covered in peanut butter, chocolate and powdered sugar, placed in a Christmas tin. Lasts about as long as it takes to read that recipe outloud.
EDGE: If a character in your book/story was celebrating Christmas how would they do it?
Jerome Stueart: (from "One Nation Under Gods" in Tesseracts 14) I think Celia is a very traditional person, despite the fact that she can't memorize history. I think she would make a new quilt every Christmas. I think she'd put out all the decorations too, and light candles, embedded in holly wreaths. She'd get an old phonograph and play Christmas songs too, and she'd want to hear stories about the family, not the gods. I think she'd be the dessert chef for the season. And I think when she had baked cookies that she'd bring them to everyone in the living room, everyone wrapped in one of her quilts and sit around the tree eating and talking....
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EDGE: Are you more of a Santa or Scrooge?
Brent Hayward: Santa. My kids are young, so Xmas is exciting again, just like it was several decades ago.
EDGE: Do you have anything unique or special thing you do to celebrate the holiday season?
Brent Hayward: My wife is from a Jewish background, and I am from a Protestant family, so now we have a tree and a menorah. Not too unique, but that's all I have.
EDGE: What was the strangest Christmas/Hanukah/Yule/insert other celebration here gift you ever received?
Brent Hayward: A friend of mine once left a large yam on my door stop.
EDGE: What is your favorite holiday treat (sweet or otherwise)?
Brent Hayward: I quite like Xmas pudding with hard sauce, a British dessert at this time of year.
EDGE: If a character in your book/story was celebrating Christmas how would they do it?
Brent Hayward: Lucinda would drink to excess while listening to full blast Motorhead; Moira would imagine she was at the Nutcracker.
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EDGE: Are you more of a Santa or Scrooge? (Elaborate as much as you want around that.)
Sandra Kasturi: I'm a Rudolph, with a red nose from too much rum and eggnog.
EDGE: Do you have anything unique or special thing you do to celebrate the holiday season?
Sandra Kasturi: Well, traditionally, I like to plan lots of events and social things and try to host or attend as many as I can, just so I can work myself up into a state of stressful, frenzied, financially exhausted lather, to eventually collapse sobbing hysterically onto the bed, insisting that no, I will not make another trifle, while my husband stands over me shaking his head and saying, "Oh, monkey..."
Oh, and I get out my "Christmas Books" and reread them: Agatha Christie's "The Adventure of the Christmas Pudding," Susan Cooper's THE DARK IS RISING, C.S. Lewis's THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, J.R.R. Tolkien's THE HOBBIT, and a bunch of juicy murder mysteries. There's really nothing so comforting as a murder for the holidays. That, and a nice latke brunch.
EDGE: What was the strangest Christmas gift you ever received?
Sandra Kasturi: My stepbrother gave me a self-help book called SUCCESSFULLY SINGLE, when I was about 21. I was confused. I was pretty sure I was supposed to be single at 21.
EDGE: What is your favorite holiday treat (sweet or otherwise)?
Sandra Kasturi: Favourite holiday treat: I know it sounds disgusting, but probably the Estonian blood sausages, and also their jellied veal, with super-hot spicy mustard, also from Estonia, that comes in a tube like toothpaste. Also, my mother's gingerbread cookies, and this Italian Sienna cake that I sometimes make, with cocoa and different kinds of nuts. Yum!
EDGE: If a character in your book/story was celebrating Christmas how would they do it?
Sandra Kasturi: If a character in my book/story was celebrating the holidays... hmmm. Well, in my story "Foxford" the two sisters kind of hate each other, so I imagine the one might eat the other one instead of having a Christmas turkey. Now isn't that festive?
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Your name: Jon Leitch
EDGE: Are you more of a Santa or Scrooge?
Jon Leitch: I’m more of a Santa. I actually enjoy shopping (but not at Christmas time) and I’m one of the best wrappers I know. I think the best part of Christmas is watching someone open a present I’ve bought and be really surprised and appreciative.
EDGE: Do you have anything unique or special thing you do to celebrate the holiday season?
Jon Leitch: When I was young we used to open 1 present a day until they were all gone. My wife refuses to do that.
EDGE: What was the strangest Christmas/Hanukah/Yule/insert other celebration here gift you ever received?
Jon Leitch: A large cardboard box (in the times when we opened 1 present a day). It was eventually pointed out that there was a pen taped under wrapping paper on one of the flaps.
EDGE: What is your favorite holiday treat (sweet or otherwise)?
Jon Leitch: Nanaimo Bar and rum laced eggnog.
EDGE: If a character in your book/story was celebrating Christmas how would they do it?
Jon Leitch: Thomas and Vicki would head for Hawaii
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EDGE: Are you more of a Santa or Scrooge?
Michelle Barker: I'm a Scrooge in November when I'm not ready for snow or Christmas music or pre-Christmas sales. Now it is December. I'm still not ready for snow or Christmas music or pre-Christmas sales, but I do love the idea of our whole family coming together and spending time with each other, so I think I edge towards Santa as the 25th draws nearer.
EDGE: Do you have anything unique or special thing you do to celebrate the holiday season?
Michelle Barker: Yes. Just before Christmas we exchange names (in secret) and then we each have $10 to go out and buy the other person a great gift. This is something of a contest. Greatest gift wins. However, it was most fun the year we were in Mexico when bargaining was involved. The contest was, greatest bargain wins. The market was small and we kept catching glimpses of each other scurrying from one store to another trying to make a good deal.
EDGE:What was the strangest Christmas/Hanukah/Yule/insert other celebration here gift you ever received?
Michelle Barker: Pots. I mean, I needed them, but come on.
EDGE: What is your favorite holiday treat (sweet or otherwise)?
Michelle Barker: My mother bakes and sends us elaborate gingerbread men every year. They're the greatest.
EDGE: If a character in your book/story was celebrating Christmas how would they do it?
Michelle Barker: My poems are all about death. I do not believe my mouth-less man with the generous moustache who stands guard at death's door has ever heard of Christmas.
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EDGE: Are you more of a Santa or Scrooge? (Elaborate as much as you want around that.)
Susan Forest: Definitely, Santa -- love everything about Christmas!
The cup is definitely half full -- okay overflowing.
EDGE: Do you have anything unique or special thing you do to celebrate the holiday season?
Susan Forest: I make a gingerbread house (with stained glass windows lit by a little lightbulb from the inside so it shines on the pond outside the window) every year.
EDGE: What was the strangest Christmas/Hanukah/Yule/insert other celebration here gift you ever received?
Susan Forest: My friends aren't all that imaginative. I win at strange.
EDGE: What is your favorite holiday treat (sweet or otherwise)?
Susan Forest: Doing a 1000-piece jigsaw puzzle of the world while watching "The Devil Wears
Prada" while drinking Bailey's in front of the wood fire -- with no one else in the house.
EDGE: If a character in your book/story was celebrating Christmas how would they do it?
Susan Forest: Watching Shakespearian movies, drinking wine and smoking a joint.
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TESSERACTS FOURTEEN: Strange Canadian Stories, edited by John Robert Colombo and Brett Alexander Savory, features innovative short stories and poetry by 23 of Canada’s finest speculative fiction writers.
This anthology joins a 20+ year Canadian literary legacy that features the writing and editing of more than 200 of Canada’s best known authors, including Margaret Atwood, Robert J. Sawyer, Elisabeth Vonarburg, Spider Robinson and William Gibson.
TESSERACTS FOURTEEN: Strange Canadian Stories Features Works by:
Robert J. Sawyer
Michelle Barker
Tony Burgess
Suzanne Church
David Clink
Michael Colangelo
Margaret Curelas
Susan Forest
L. L. Hannett
Brent Hayward
Patrick Johanneson
Sandra Kasturi
Claude Lalumière
Michael Lorenson
Catherine MacLeod
Matthew Moore
David Nickle
John Park
Jonathan Saville
Daniel Sernine (translated by Sheryl Curtis)
Leah Silverman
Jerome Stueart
Jon Martin Watts
About the Editors
John Robert Colombo is the Toronto-based author and anthologist whose byline appears on over 200 books of quality.
Brett Alexander Savory is a Bram Stoker Award-winner, has over 45 short stories published, is the author of two novels and of the foreword to TESSERACTS TWELVE.
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