Help me welcome author Lori DeJong as she shares about her upcoming Christmas release.

In July 2023, I was so excited when I was invited to join three other Scrivenings Press authors in a Christmas novella collection entitled A Match Made at Christmas, that was set to release in October 2024. My debut novel had just released two weeks before, and I was hard at work on the second book in the series. But the chance to work on a lighthearted Christmas romance novella was an opportunity I couldn’t pass up.

I’d never written a novella before but came up with a loose concept of a character who had left their small town with big dreams and was coming home for Christmas for the first time in years. I didn’t know yet if it would be him or her, just that this character’s life was at a crossroads, and I wanted their mothers involved somehow in the scheme to get them back together.

After some brainstorming, the story of Cody Lansdale and Aubrey Mayfield came into view. High school sweethearts from a small Texas town with big dreams of making it in Christian music. When they’re finally “discovered”, however, it doesn’t exactly go the way they’d planned, and Cody leaves Aubrey in Nashville to become all she can be.

Jingle Bell Matchmakers opens with Aubrey, now billed as "Aubrey May", country music star, being lured home by some misinformation eleven years later. And when she and Cody, now a widowed father of a precocious little girl, keep finding themselves in the same place at the same time, they begin to wonder if something’s going on behind the scenes.

I hope you enjoy Jingle Bell Matchmakers, a second-chance romance story with a committee of well-meaning, spunky ladies pulling the heartstrings!

About the story: When country music star Aubrey Mayfield is lured home after years away, she’s bewildered when she and ex-fiancé-now-widowed-dad Cody Lansdale keep finding themselves in the same place at the same time. As they become reacquainted, however, old feelings stir. Aubrey’s at a crossroads in her career and is contemplating a change. But when a chance at headlining her own tour takes her back to Nashville, Cody realizes her dreams may once again come between them. Unless God, with a little help from the Jingle Bell Committee, has a better plan.