The Candlewick Mill Christmas Series

Welcome to Candlewick Mill, where Christmas traditions are a hundred years old, everybody knows your business by breakfast, and falling in love doesn’t have an expiration date.

Once, the old Vermont mill spun cotton. Now its brick halls are filled with small shops, warm kitchens, artists’ studios, upstairs apartments, and people determined to keep the things that matter from disappearing.

Every Christmas brings a new problem. An unfinished sleigh that has to choose between Fifth Avenue and a lantern-lit mountain. A century-old glass star shattered weeks before Christmas Eve. A beloved carol with a harmony nobody ever wrote down. Two draft horses in need of a home. And one locked room in the Mill that hasn’t been opened since the last shift walked out on Christmas Eve, 1994.

At the center of each story is a woman in her fifties who already has a life. She’s built a career, raised a family, survived loss, made mistakes, and learned a few things the hard way. She isn’t waiting to be rescued, reinvented, or told who she ought to become. But she might still have room for something she didn’t expect.

The Candlewick Mill later in life romances are sweet, closed-door Christmas love stories filled with small-town warmth, grown-up characters, family traditions, old-fashioned craftsmanship, snowy Vermont nights, and the delicious possibility that some of the best chapters in life come later.

For the past nineteen years, Carol Stack has run the Candlewick Hollow Christmas Stroll.

She knows which shopkeeper will forget the extension cords, which committee member will try to hang eight wreaths where six belong, and exactly how much cocoa a town can drink before somebody has to find another urn. Carol is sixty years old, practical to the bone, and very good at taking care of everyone else’s December. For six winters, someone has been taking care of one small piece of hers.

Every year before the Stroll opens, split wood appears on Carol’s back porch, stacked neat as a promise. No note. No knock. No name. Carol has never asked who left it, and whoever he is has never asked to be thanked. This year, the wood doesn’t come.

The missing stack leads Carol up the old sugar road to Hank Pelletier, a widower with a bad wrist, a blue truck, and far too much practice standing on the far side of a door. What begins as irritation over firewood becomes soup in a quiet kitchen, lanterns tested after hours, a stubborn shed door finally fixed, and the unsettling discovery that being cared for may be the one thing Carol never learned how to accept.

Set before Tinsel & Trails, Kindling & Kisses is a sweet, closed-door Christmas novelette from The Candlewick Mill Romances, full of woodsmoke, warm kitchens, old friends, second chances, and one woman who has spent years making Christmas happen for everyone else finally finding a little of it waiting for her.

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For thirty-one years, Gwen Radliff has built Christmas for everyone else. This year, she may finally find one of her own.

At fifty-five, Gwen designs the Christmas Eve windows at Halliday’s on Fifth Avenue, the kind people line up around the block to see. This year’s centerpiece needs a real hand-built sleigh, so she finds herself in Candlewick Mill, Vermont. She'll look at the sleigh, write the check, and go home.

Except the hundredth Lachance sleigh is still unfinished in Mitch Lachance’s workshop, exactly where his mother left it before she died in March. And Mitch isn’t selling before Christmas.

For ninety-nine years, every Lachance sleigh has made its first run on Christmas Eve, climbing Candlewick Mountain while the town follows behind with lanterns. Mitch promised his mother the hundredth would make the trip too.

Gwen’s store window opens that same night. Five hours south. She has until December twenty-second to change his mind.

Neither of them has made a plan for what happens if, somewhere between ugly snow boots, cardamom buns, and nineteen days in the same workshop, going home becomes the harder choice.

A warm, sweet, closed-door Christmas romance about two people in their fifties, one unfinished sleigh, and a town very good at making room for one more.

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