I hate sexy Santas. Ditto naughty elves.
So, much as I love holiday romances, I tread pretty carefully when it comes to contemporaries lest I stumble upon some costumed bonking under the Christmas tree. Historicals are my safe territory. There’s always snow and plenty of mistletoe but no jokes about sliding down the chimney and no tinsel ending up in the wrong places. I reread the holiday books from my favourite sagas – Christmas is always the time to check in with every single member of a fictitious family – and discovered some great new stuff – including the collection How the Dukes Stole Christmas.
But I couldn’t stay in this well-curated winter wonderland forever. This last year, I challenged myself to read more romance subgenres. If sexy contemporaries were out, I would have to go further afield. Much further. I don’t read Sci-Fi or Fantasy Romance, but I felt reasonably certain that they were Santa-suit free. My amazing Blood Sisters’ Book Club companion, Kelsey, was fortunately willing to hold my hand on the intergalactic journey.
First up: Ice Planet Holiday. Ruby Dixon’s Barbarian Ice Planet series is hard to miss. Mostly because each cover features an enormous blue dude with horns, his human companion plastered to his side – or groin. I plunged right into Barbarian Holiday despite the clear warning from the author that this was not a standalone read. Kelsey had done a little pre-reading and filled me in on a need-to-know basis. Basically, a cargo of human women crash land on said Ice Planet only to be rescued by a tribe of alien barbarians suffering a convenient female shortage. The concept is goofy but I quickly grasped that Ruby Dixon knows exactly what she’s doing.
Take away all the trimmings – the blue horned men and the pink trees – and you’ve got a group of displaced women struggling to create community in a strange and often hostile new place. In Ice Planet Holiday, they want to create a celebration to alleviate homesickness. And to mark time on a planet without calendars. And to have something toward which they can actually look forward. How could anybody contemplating the 2020 holidays not relate to this scenario? God, I could. Previously, my partner and I have split for Christmas and done the family thing. Now we had to deal with celebrating away from home and with each other’s very different Christmas traditions. We couldn’t even agree on which day to exchange presents!
Thankfully, I had a host of bananas novellas to remind me that Christmas could get a whole lot more challenging than the one before me. Kelsey and I tried aliens that crash-landed outside snowy Adirondack cabins, we tried Canadian vampires who got snowed in, and even, for a change, two humans who found themselves all alone at a galactic airport on Christmas Eve. But it turned out that nothing hit the spot like Ice Planet.
Next was Barbarian’s Hope, a holiday novel in disguise, then The Barbarian Before Christmas. (I also had to read the one about the woman who doesn’t get any presents in Ice Planet Holiday just to make sure things worked out for her – #TeamJosie!) Each time, it was a delight to read about the Ice Planet’s newest inhabitants’ attempts to explain why mistletoe was romantic, or the point of a white elephant gift exchange, or to decorate one of those pink trees.
Before 2020, I never imagined reading a single book about blue barbarian aliens. Now I’ve read four. While I’m not glad the past twelve months have turned out like they have, the year’s made me less judgemental about the emotional needs of myself and others. It’s made me unapologetic about comfort reads. As a bonus, I’ve also learnt some delicious holiday recipes in case next year I’m on a literal rather than a figurative alien planet. Can’t rule out any contingency.
