‘Tis The Season: Authors Talk Holidays is a special seasonal feature on Pop! Goes The Reader in which some of my favourite authors help me to celebrate the spirit of the season and spread a little holiday cheer. So, pour yourself a cup of hot chocolate and snuggle in by the fireside as they answer the question: “What does the holiday season mean to you?”
About Leah Johnson
Leah Johnson is a writer, editor and eternal Midwesterner currently moonlighting as a New Yorker. Leah received her MFA in fiction writing from Sarah Lawrence College, where she currently teaches in their undergraduate writing program. Her debut YA novel, You Should See Me In A Crown is forthcoming from Scholastic in 2020.
As I write this, I’m sitting on the twin-sized bed in my childhood bedroom, exhausted from a day of travel and surrounded by posters of circa-2011 Taylor Lautner and A Fever You Can’t Sweat Out-era Panic! At the Disco. I am not the same girl who hung these posters a decade ago, am so far from the girl who won the ribbons on the wall and the trophies on the bookshelf, that I sometimes struggle to recognize her when I step into this Museum of Old Leah. But other times, on visits like this one where I’m so overcome with memory and nostalgia and that particular brand of Christmas spirit that obscures all sorts of reason, I can step through these doors and into my old skin, and it fits like a glove.
Until about three years ago, Christmas Eve in our household was an almost formulaic affair. We’d watch old animated Christmas movies on ABC Family, and critique the same strange psychedelic Mrs. Claus song in Santa Claus Is Comin’ to Town. In the years where we could, we’d bake cookies at night that were always mysteriously still there in the morning (I always had a sneaking suspicion that Santa was a bit ungrateful — didn’t his parents teach him not to pass up a refreshment when he came into someone’s house??). And finally, my parents would start dropping hints that Santa was on his way around eleven and send us on our way.
For years, what followed were piles of blankets on the floor of one of our bedrooms, my siblings and I nestled in and anxious about what was to come. It didn’t matter whether we believed that there would be a white man wandering into our house and leaving us tax-free gifts in the dark of night. It didn’t matter that at some point we had grown too old and too big to fit on the floor comfortably together anymore. What mattered was the way nostalgia curled around us in those blanket nests each year, the way tradition can sometimes carry us far past the point of rationale.
One year though, when I was around fourth or fifth grade, my older brother introduced a new tradition. He was in high school at this point, and in my mind infinitely cooler and more cultured than me or my little sister. So when he said, “I have something for us to listen to tonight,” and played the Brooklyn the Musical original Broadway cast album from his phone (or iPod dock or CD player, I can’t remember now what we were using in such dark times), there was no moment of questioning why or what for. The notes simply wove themselves into our memory as if they’d always been there, and become our new routine.
To be completely honest with you, without a quick Wikipedia search, I wouldn’t be able to tell you what Brooklyn is about off the top of my head. I know it’s a play within a play, a story about an orphaned child prodigy with a gift for music and a song handed down to her from her mother that she can’t quite remember, but aside from that the details are a bit fuzzy. Usually, after Brooklyn’s voice lilted out over the first notes of her “Unfinished Lullaby,” I was a goner. Sleep would take me without my having much say in the matter, and I’d wake up a few hours later to my sister shaking my shoulder, demanding that we get our parents up for the big reveal. But even so, Christmas and Brooklyn are so tangled up in one another now — no way to separate what it used to be from what it has become — I’m not sure the plot even matters all that much.
It shouldn’t come as that much of a surprise that we can’t do this anymore. In time, our own growing families and different cities and obligations to jobs made it difficult to spend Christmas Eve and the thrilling, gift-giving, morning-that’s-not-quite-morning together. But, no matter where I am in the world, or where my siblings are, I have to believe that we’re listening to the same song each Christmas Eve. I have to believe that the same soundtrack of warmth and home and faith in the impossible act of giving without expectation and loving without exception is what is rocking us all to sleep. Because I couldn’t imagine Christmas without it.
Title You Should See Me in A Crown
Author Leah Johnson
Intended Target Audience Young Adult
Genre Contemporary, Realistic Fiction, Romance
Publication Date June 2nd 2020 by Scholastic Press
Find It On Goodreads ● Amazon.com ● Chapters ● The Book Depository ● Barnes & Noble ● IndieBound
Becky Albertalli meets Jenny Han in a smart, hilarious, black girl magic, own voices rom-com by a staggeringly talented new writer.
Liz Lighty has always believed she’s too black, too poor, too awkward to shine in her small, rich, prom-obsessed midwestern town. But it’s okay – Liz has a plan that will get her out of Campbell, Indiana, forever: attend the uber-elite Pennington College, play in their world-famous orchestra, and become a doctor.
But when the financial aid she was counting on unexpectedly falls through, Liz’s plans come crashing down…until she’s reminded of her school’s scholarship for prom king and queen. There’s nothing Liz wants to do less than endure a gauntlet of social media trolls, catty competitors, and humiliating public events, but despite her devastating fear of the spotlight she’s willing to do whatever it takes to get to Pennington.
The only thing that makes it halfway bearable is the new girl in school, Mack. She’s smart, funny, and just as much of an outsider as Liz. But Mack is also in the running for queen. Will falling for the competition keep Liz from her dreams…or make them come true?
