One Last Holiday Tradition

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• What's new with Ashleigh?
• Ashleigh's Reading Challenge
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What's new with Ashleigh?

It would be impossible to have a discussion about holiday traditions without discussing food. While my family is Italian, we have never celebrated the traditional seven fishes for Christmas. There simply were never enough people who ate seafood.

However, we do love our desserts. Italian pastries are a must, of course. While we never really go crazy about cake, we do love our cookies and pies.

One year, my aunt decided to share her recipes with us girls. Her goal was to give us a new recipe each Christmas, but she only gave us one. My favorite one: Chocolate-covered peanut butter balls. Unfortunately, I have misplaced that recipe, but I am hoping to find it next year.

I am not a huge fan of sugar and gingerbread cookies. Don't get me wrong. When made well, they are pretty delicious. I just hate the whole chilling, rolling, and cutting process. I prefer drop cookies.

If I'm being completely honest, I have a cookie addiction and have been known to make cookie just for fun. At the beginning of the month, however, we had a cookie swap and I made my favorite cookies. (I'll tell you more about them in a moment.) That fueled my cookie addition and I have been making cookies every week since.

One year, I wanted to make ginger cookies that weren't cut-outs. After searching the cookbook, I found a recipe for gingersnaps. However, I made a few substitutions, such as making them egg-free. I also added some cocoa powder. The result was a very soft cookie that has become my mother's favorite as well.

I'd still love to hear more about your holiday traditions on Bluesky, Facebook, or Instagram.

However, as we move toward the end of the year, I'd love to know:

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Ashleigh's Reading Challenge

Some of our readers have met their goal. As we head into the new year, I would like to know who would be interested in doing a new challenge in 2024?

Free Books

Kayaks, Kisses & Monsters A summer of kayaking sounds perfect. Until the lake monster appears. For Ellie, getting paid to spend her summer outside sounds like the ideal internship, even if it means paddling up and down a river twelve hours a day. Sure, she's never actually been in a kayak before, but how hard could it be? At least she knows how to set up camp at night. Unlike her co-worker. Though Clay may be captain of the crew team, she could teach him a thing or two about spending the night in a sleeping bag. And then there's the whole lake monster thing. Of course, Ellie knows water monsters aren't real but Clay doesn't seem convinced, especially after a boater goes missing. When mysterious accidents threaten her job security, Ellie starts to wonder why the "monster" wants her gone.

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Want more free books? Check out these giveaways!

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Other Books on Sale

Forever Feelings A Second Chance Romance for a Single Mom Trust your gauges and bet on the unexpected! Joshua ‘Paradox’ Parr had no intention of taking his wingman’s cast-aside friend out on a date as a favor. He wasn’t ‘stepdad material,’ nor was he like the other love-struck members of the squadron. There was something about Mallory that confused the stealthy pilot, making him curious. … And curiosity could be a dangerous thing! Don’t give up the battle until the last round is spent… Mallory Duncan was floundering to hang on while the rest of the world around her swam in one gigantic pool of euphoria. She was stuck cleaning the skimmer for debris, searching for something more. One stupid mistake changed her life, and now things were changing again, bringing her face to face with the most confusing and frustrating man she’d ever met – Joshua. Could an exhausted single mom, a jaded Flyboy, a healthy dose of hope, be just what the doctor ordered? Or was giving in to this fanciful dream more than either of them had bargained for?

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