About the Blog

The Christmas Mystery

The Christmas Mystery is a book, one of my favourites, by Jostein Gaarder. It tells two stories at once; first, it follows the boy Joachim, his parents and a few other people through December; and second, it tells the tale of a girl called Elisabet, who runs from her Christmas shopping mother following a lamb out of the shopping centre. Elisabet suddenly finds herself on a pilgrimage from Norway to Bethlehem, from modern times back to the birth of Jesus Christ. The story of the pilgrimage is hidden in Joachim's magic advent calendar. Every day, a new chapter is revealed and a new character from the nativity story joins the pilgrims (if you are wondering how there can be 24 of those, sheep count, too).

For me, this book is a traditional read in December. One short chapter a day reminds me that it's Christmas time.

24 Flashes

As you can probably imagine, this blog is connected to the book in some way or other. It will consist of 24 flash fiction stories, written by me. These stories will not revolve around Christmas, Christ or religion as such, though. The connection to the book is a more subtle one: Every chapter of The Christmas Mystery is not only named after a day in December, but also with a snippet of text from Elisabet's story. These snippets can be whole sentences or just parts, with a length between seven and thirty words.

My mission on this blog will be to write flash fiction stories including one snippet per story. Every story will be whole and comprehensible on its own, and except for the snippet of text it will not be connected to the book. All stories may, or may not, revolve around a specific set of characters, though.

My posts will be written first in my head on busses and trains – and later typed and finalised during lunch breaks at work. That way, I will not be able to post daily, but two to three times a week should be possible.

Flash fiction in this case means well under 1000 words, but definitely more than six, seeing that I have at least seven of Jostein Gaarder's words to include every time.


I hope you will enjoy this little experiment,

Sarah