Christmas in July: The Jack Frost Novel is Finally Out!

Click image to check out buying options.

Back in 2013, when the book that was to become my wife’s first bestseller was months away from publication, I found myself with time on my hands. It had taken her seven years to write and research that book, and we were constantly driving up and down the east coast so she could interview people and investigate archives.

But now her book was done, and something I had wanted to write finally had the breathing room to come to life. I envisioned a multi-book series about the life of Kris Kringle. I was inspired by the Mary Stewart books I’d read as a kid, on the life of King Arthur. The first book in that series focused not on Arthur but on Merlin as a boy. Because it had seemed logical to Stewart that we should understand the mentor before the mentee.

I wanted to do something similar. The book I wrote in 2013 was in Jack Frost’s voice. As I described it to my then-agent, the book was: “The life of Kris Kringle, as told by her adoptive father, Jack Frost.”

No matter who I told that pitch to would sit up and say, “Her?”

Which was cool. That, after all, was the whole point of the series—that Santa was a woman all along.

Point being, no one cared about Jack Frost, including, possibly, my agent. It took me the better part of a decade to realize that there are not enough cultural references that click with people (ie, readers) about Jack Frost. But everyone in the world knows Santa Claus, or whatever the gift-bringer icon is in their culture.

So I focused the story on Kringle, writing at least two vastly different drafts of her story. The second version clicked with the agent, but she was not able to sell it. Editors don’t want a seasonal fantasy novel, went the argument.

Oh well, silly me for thinking otherwise.

I indie-pubbed Sorceress Kringle in 2019, and got to work on a sequel.

But I had all this Jack Frost material burning a hole on my hard drive. And when I occasionally peeked at the opening scenes of his story, I got sucked in. I loved his voice. He was a cantankerous prick, the total opposite of sweet, wholesome Kringle.

Could I revise the material and release a prequel? Well, why the hell not?

So today I’m happy to announce that The Icemaster of New-York is finally out in the world, eleven years after it was first conceived. It’s a shorter book than Kringle, and takes place about sixteen years before Kringle takes the stage. It’s bloodier, messier, and sexier too.

I’m proud of it, mostly because it does a good job of telling how Jack Frost came to be, and why he’s so freaking angry. I think you would be, too, if the work of your hands was considered bleak and miserable by most people after the glamor of Christmas wears off each New Year’s Eve.

The book is available in three formats: ebook, paperback, and hardcover. Design by the marvelous James Egan of Bookfly Design, who did the Sorceress Kringle cover back in 2019.

Check out both books here. Autographed copies, as always, are available from Malaprop’s, the bookstore in my town.

It’s good to see the old bastard out in the world at last, telling his own story. You might hate him, but rest assured he hates you, too.

Click image to check out your buying options…

Eight Arguments for a Female Santa Claus

My new historical fantasy novel about a female Santa Claus pubs today–the eve of St. Nicholas–and I thought I’d take the time to lay out the case for a female Santa Claus, and maybe clarify (if only to myself) how I even came up with such an idea. Some thoughts on the subject follow, and with it, I hope, some insight into this writer’s mind and process.

1. I think the seeds of the idea are rooted in my childhood. My mom grew up in Italy believing not in Santa Claus but in La Befana—a broom-riding female witch who brought presents to children on the eve of the Epiphany, i.e., the day the Magi encountered the Christ child in the manger. When Denise and I lived briefly in Italy, we’d see these adorable Befana dolls sold in Christmas markets in Rome.

2. It took me six years and three rewrites to get this book right. During that time, I learned that researching the history of Christmas sometimes feels like partaking in a massive, multi-century, international game of telephone, where language is constantly being corrupted and reframed for new purposes. The German-named Christkindl is a traditional European gift-bringer who is a kind of fae-like personification of the Christ child. But you could not ask for a more gender-ambiguous name than its corruption: Kris Kringle.

3. Similarly, the name Santa Claus is a corruption of the Dutch Sinterklaas (i.e., Saint Nicholas). But when I was growing up, my mom always referred to female saints as Santa Maria, Santa Teresa, Santa Cecilia. Male saints were San Francisco, San Giuseppe, etc. To my early mind, a Santa anyone was female unless otherwise noted.

4. I love the work of writer Washington Irving, who inserted a gift-giving St. Nicholas into his early 19th-century satirical history of New York City, so much so that one historian flat-out said, “Without Irving there would be no Santa Claus.” A couple of years after Irving’s book pubbed, the Dec. 28, 1815 edition of the New York Evening Post took a different tack, trotting out a female Santa Claus, dubbing her “Queen and Empress of the Court of Fashions.” Scans of the original article are a little hard to read (and the content sexist) but you can get the gist here.

5. My wife spent seven years researching women’s work during World War II. Among the many jobs women performed when men were off fighting in the war was the role of department store Santas. This did not always go over well with traditionalists during that era, leading to the over-the-top newspaper editorials described in this 2017 article in Smithsonian.

6. WWII was long gone by the time I arrived on the scene, but as a kid, I’m certain I sat on the lap of many a female Santa. More to the point, I’ve always thought that Santa’s look was outrageously…suspicious. Overdetermined, if you will. When someone dresses like they’re trying to hide something, they probably are. Why couldn’t the real Santa be a woman in drag?

7. In her book, Liar, Temptress, Soldier, Spy, author Karen Abbott investigates Confederate women spies during the Civil War. In one of her talks, Abbott, a friend, said that one of these women successfully passed as a man simply by donning men’s clothing. In 19th century America, that’s all it took. If you wore trousers, you had to be a dude, because what else could you possibly be? In my book, Kringle intentionally hides her identity, like any superhero, and takes up arms to defend the people she loves. Throughout history women fought in battle–disguised as men or otherwise–though the practice has strangely been ignored by us supposedly open-minded moderns, as brilliantly explored in this now-famous essay.

8. Last year, a viral news story raised the notion of a gender-neutral Santa, and Snopes had to step in to set the record straight. But academics have actually probed the notion, pointing out that most of the work of Christmas cheer, not to mention the nurturing of children and other family members, is still performed by women.

So there’s some of my thinking on the matter. As I’ve said the whole time I’ve been working on this book, I can’t really picture an elderly obese dude willingly leaving his cozy man-cave on a cold winter’s night to ride in a drafty open sleigh. There’s no question in my mind: the big man is not a man at all, and never has been.

---

If you’re interested, you can check out the first chapter of the new book here. Thanks for stopping by.