When in doubt, make it one line.
If you know me personally (maybe even if you don’t), you know I get excited about Christmas as soon as the clock strikes midnight on Halloween. Then it’s yuletide festivities galore! I listen to Christmas music, I pull out a few Christmas decorations, I dream of a white Christmas, etc. etc.
Not one of those people? Feel free to read something else, because this is going to be Christmas AF.
This time of year, I also watch an embarrassing amount of Hallmark Christmas movies. So many. They are so much fun; perfectly predictable, fancifully festive, … [insert one more cute alliteration here].
One that came out this year was called Christmas at Pemberley Manor. If “Pemberley” sounds familiar, it’s because it is the name of the estate owned by Mr. Darcy in Pride and Prejudice. The movie had almost nothing to do with Jane Austen, except the character names and who ended up with whom.
Though the movie left something to be desired (though it was full of Christmas cuteness), it inspired me to write a P&P based Christmas story.
As it goes often with my writing, I wrote the first line and blanked. After a few days of noodling on the first line, I realized it would be fun to turn a number of classic first lines into the beginnings of Christmas stories. Here they are! See if you can guess where they’re from.
- It is a truth universally acknowledged that the Bennett family must go to the Crystal Lake Lodge at Christmas time.
- It was a bright cold day in December, and the bells were chiming twelve.
- Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the Blue Spruce trees for the Christmas ball herself.
- For a long time, I went to bed early, especially on Christmas Eve.
- In my younger and more vulnerable years my father gave me a Christmas gift that I’ve been pondering over ever since.
- It was a queer, quiet Christmas, the Christmas they orbited the moon, and I didn’t know what I was doing in New York.
- In the late December of that year we lived in a stone cottage in a village that looked across the frozen river and the snowy plain to the mountains.
See? So festive. I’d also like to apologize to all the classic novels whose first lines I just butchered.
If you have any classic first lines turned Christmas-y I’d love to read them!
Jenna Goldsmith 