Elizabeth Loupas

Lucky St. Patrick’s Day news! NAL has moved the release date of The Second Duchess up by one month, so it will now make its debut in January 2011. Somehow that seems so much sooner than February 2011!

We readers all get book cards and book gift certificates for Christmas, right? So when you hit the bookstores in January with your Christmas book-buying booty, keep The Second Duchess in mind. And don’t worry—I’ll remind you again. Heh. Probably more than once.

And as for St. Patrick’s Day luck, well, I come from a long line of McConnells on my dear mother’s side. Sláinte!

My ancestors didn’t come over on the Mayflower, but they were not far behind on one of the voyages of the Abigail, which sailed from London April to July 1635, arriving in Massachusetts Bay. Henry Collins, my ninth great-grandfather, a starchmaker (all those ruffs and caps had to be starched by someone, you know) from Stepney, Middlesex, brought his wife Ann and his three young children Henry, John and Margery. I’m descended from John (who was only three at the time of the voyage), through the Motts, Rhodeses, Sarjents, McConnells and Flemings.

So although they weren’t Pilgrims but ordinary Puritan tradesmen, here’s to the Collins family, who sailed to the New World and settled in Lynn, Massachusetts. Here’s to Ann Collins, who undertook a two-month-plus voyage across the Atlantic in cramped shipboard quarters with three children, ages five, three and two! Men may have gotten all the credit for bravery in those days, but a woman who could manage that is a woman I’m proud to be descended from.

Happy Thanksgiving wishes to everyone—because even if you don’t celebrate Thanksgiving Day as a holiday, it’s always good to be thankful.

This morning at the crack of dawn (well, not quite, but almost) a little boy rang our doorbell and delivered a box of doughnuts. Why, you ask? Well, a couple of weeks ago that same little boy worked his little-boy wiles on the Broadcasting Legend™ and convinced him to buy a box of doughnuts for some sort of school fund-raising project. (We live a few blocks from an elementary school and the neighborhood is awash in cute kids selling stuff.) Why doughnuts? Because yesterday was National Doughnut Day. I didn’t even know there was such a thing as National Doughnut Day. The things you learn from second-graders!

Where did the word “doughnut” come from? Well, according to my beloved Online Etymology Dictionary, it was first recorded about 1809 by Washington Irving, who took a break from managing the first viral book-marketing campaign to describe them as “balls of sweetened dough, fried in hog’s fat, and called doughnuts, or ‘olykoeks.’” So clearly the first doughnuts were hole-less, and actually resembled nuts. And hog’s fat. Yum.

I’ll take Krispy Kremes, thank you.

After two holiday weeks (and I do love the holidays, but still) of not knowing for certain what day it was at any given moment, I am now firmly anchored again. It’s Monday. As Pippa sings in Mr. Browning’s famous poem/play Pippa Passes, “God’s in his heaven—all’s right with the world.”

I think I need to put together a fantasy writers group of men, too. Robert Browning, of course. Algernon Charles Swinburne (swoon). E.F. Benson, author of the glorious Lucia books. Who else?

On New Year’s Day we have an open house from noonish to whenever people stop dropping by. It always features mimosas, one of the Broadcasting Legend™’s justly famed baked hams, and plates and plates of home-baked cookies. People bring family members, children (from grown-up college students home on break to heart-melting six-month-old twins) and pets to play with Cressie and Boo. The men play with the traditional toy train (a toy train will have all adult males down on the floor in five seconds flat—try it). A good time is had by all.

Today was no exception.

Kalo Podariko, or Happy First-Foot!

The Broadcasting Legend™ occasionally teaches me snippets of Greek, and this is a traditional greeting for New Year’s Eve. As in other countries around the world (notably Scotland, which figures in my own heritage), the first person to set foot in one’s house in a new year can bring either good or bad luck.

The custom goes that immediately after the stroke of midnight, all the lights in the house are turned off and everyone goes outside. Then a particularly lucky person, often the youngest child, steps back into the house. Right foot first, please! All other family members then follow, also entering with the right foot, and all the lights are re-lighted for the new year.

May we all be blessed by good luck in 2009!