Christmas Day has come and gone for another year. I hope you all had a wonderful time yesterday. I had a very enjoyable day, all the more so since last year's was a washout -- on Christmas Eve 2019, I started to feel sick and ran a fever, so we couldn't meet up with anyone else in our family until I'd been tested for COVID (luckily it came back negative). This year I was hale and hearty, so we were able to see my parents (Mr Shan's mother - known to the grandkids as Bapcia - is staying with us for Christmas, so she was already in situ) and some cousins for a very rowdy, rib-tickling quiz night.

But while Santa is now resting back in the North Pole, we're still in the middle of the festive season, so I thought I'd share some photos taken a few days before Christmas, when we went to Bunratty (a folk park in County Clare that we often visit) at night for their Christmas Lights Experience. We go there pretty much every yuletide with the kids, and they always get a great kick out of it.

The first photo was taken not long after we had arrived. The next two were taken outside the park's castle, which is where Santa addresses the crowds from the safety of the drawbridge. And Bapcia has a ride with the grandkiddies on the carousel in the fourth -- this was the first time that Gaia would go on a ride like a carousel, so we were delighted that she was fully getting into the swing of things.

You have another day or so to read my seasonal SHANTA CLAUS short story, which I'll probably be taking down tomorrow for another year. It's a FREE short story, which I post every year around this time, and it features Shanta going about his annual rounds, and bumping into a surprising number of characters from my books... as well as ME, as I break the fourth wall and chat about what I've been up to recently, and some things that might be coming in the near future! Click on the following link to go on the journey of a lifetime with SHANTA: https://darrenshan.com/extras/feature/short-stories-shanta-claus-only-available-at-christmas-yuletide-favourite2