My first festive share of the season and it’s an absolute stonker! Introducing ‘Sprouts’ by Sibéal Pounder. Be sure to read Sibéal’s piece about women as festive characters – Mrs Claus and Christmas witches finally get the recognition the deserve!

“In the year 4024, there lived a young girl with jet black hair who truly hated witches. Unfortunately, she was one.” 

Enter the future where it’s Christmas day … every day. Except, that is, on the Mince Pie Isles where a group of rebel witches live in secret, illegally celebrating just once a year and practicing their sprout-based magic passed down through an old spell book from Guardian to Guardian. Gryla Garland is a young witch who thinks it might be quite nice to celebrate Christmas every day, just like everyone else. But when the hapless and accident-prone young witch is unexpectedly chosen as the next Guardian of the spell book, she discovers that 24/7 Christmas – governed by a tyrannical Santa – isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. Now she just has to think of a way to change it back …”

---

Sibéal Pounder on WOMEN AS FESTIVE CHARACTERS

When it comes to festive figures here in the UK, Mrs Claus is the main female character we meet every year. But she’s a bit of a mystery. No one can ever really answer what her role is (aside from Santa’s wife). Some say she looks after all the elves and cleans and cooks – for thousands and thousands of elves, who are mostly, as far as I’m aware, grown-ups. I once worked out how many mince pies she would have to be cooking daily to feed such a hardworking bunch of elves. There are 1,440 minutes in a day and approximately 1,000 elves. With a cooking time of 30 minutes and space in the oven for 20 mince pies at a time, that allows for 48 batches in 24 hours, which gives 960 elves a mince pie, or 959 if Santa wants one too (which according to the stories he definitely does). In that case, either Mrs Claus is a woman with many ovens, or she spends all day and night making mince pies for not even all of the elves in the North Pole. This seems very far-fetched, so there must be more to her. It was that logic that inspired my first Christmas book Tinsel, which looked at the character of Mrs Claus and asked if maybe we’ve got the Santa story a bit wrong. 

For my new Christmas book Sprouts, I wanted to look at the other kind of woman depicted in Christmas traditions – the Christmas witches. There are a few, with the main one being Gryla, the hag who lives in a cave and boils naughty children in stews. Again, there is a strong cooking element, only rather than being a background character like Mrs Claus, she’s the other classic female trope — really, really evil. There are other witches too, my favourite being Befana, the Italian Christmas witch, who is very much like Santa, only she delivers presents to children via broom rather than sleigh (who needs reindeers when you’re magic). Both Gryla and Befana inspired Sprouts. I wanted to explore Christmas witches, and see if we’ve got that a bit wrong too. Gryla Garland is the main character – and those who have read Tinsel will know who she is a descendant of! She’s very affected by the world’s view of witches and hates the fact she is one – but when she meets Merrilee Claus, she begins to see that maybe she should be proud of who she is, that maybe the festive world has got witches all wrong. 

Sprouts by Sibéal Pounder is out now (hardback, Bloomsbury)

---

I love, love, love this brilliant Christmas book which cleverly flips Christmas on its head – Santa is a tyrannical ruler, Krampuses patrol the streets, and it really is Christmas every day!

Gryla and Merrilee make a fantastic Christmas-saving duo (even is one is slightly reluctant and the other is the daughter of Santa.) A little piece of my heart is yearning for a Tinselcat of my own and for a nibble on a gingerbread candy cane (not a sprout-flavoured one.)

Crazy, tinselly Christmas fun! I shall be recommending this story to anyone who’s on Santa’s ‘nice’ list.

Jo.

*Many thanks to Bloomsbury for inviting me to be a part of this blog tour*