For the Reader

On that eventful Christmas Eve, in 1988, when “Santa Smoke Letters” was born, I never thought it would become a book. When I returned to work after the Christmas holidays, I stayed late the first week back and wrote out exactly what happened on a large lined pad of paper. There were no computers that I could use at that time, at least not ones that would have made it easy to record the events of the story. It was my hope that one day, I would be able to put everything into a scrapbook for Colin and Kiera so that they could share the pictures and wonderful memories with their own children one day. As you can tell by the book’s illustrations, I kept all of the original scrapbook pages as I originally made them and they are what became the book as you see it published now. The scrapbooking of each of the pages took many years to finish but I wasn’t in a rush because it was only going to be a family scrapbook. Once I had the scrapbook finished, I made a few copies of it and gave them to my children and our family friends. Over time, other family members and friends would learn about the story as we shared it with many. So often the comments to me from them were something like this, “Sandy, you should publish this story. This is a great Christmas story and it’s real, which is appealing for a Christmas story.” So, I guess this sat in the back of my brain somewhere for many years until I retired. Retirement offered me the element of time to do things that just couldn’t be squeezed in when I was employed full time with the Kootenay Lake School District as a district principal of international education. A few times when I tried to publish, it flopped as I sent out manuscripts (photocopies of the scrapbook) to publishers but never heard anything back. So, I gave up. Then one day, someone recommended to me to self-publish with a reputable, Canadian publishing company, so I started to look. Unfortunately, nothing seemed to fit what I wanted to do. Finally, a connection happened and things started to roll – it was both exciting and frustrating. I am so glad I persevered with all of the headaches of publishing because the end result was really worth it.