Donna Maree Hanson, Author, Phd in Creative Writing

I love the Christmas season….but!

I don’t like all the stress. So my Christmas fantasy is that there really is a Santa Claus and he/she/it buys all the presents and maybe cooks the dinner as well.

Photo by Fionna Sullivan

Talking about fantasies leads me to think about wishes…I wish that Christmas wasn’t so commercial and that we were less materialistic generally.

We live in a capitalist society where the dollar is the key. At times I think it’s a great machine that has run mad, eating up everything in search of profit, destroying the planet, churning through people and selling the idea that the dollar is what is important.

I’m part of this great capitalist machine and while I’m caught in this churn I can’t think of a way out. I feel deeply that there is no perfect system. There might be fairer systems. What worries me that such what is conceived of a perfect system is open for abuse, of power being concentrated in the few and then the system is no longer fair.

I also hate the idea of chaos and chaos is everywhere too, stirred up by the fight for resources and supremacy. It’s hard to shut it all out. I keep a fairly positive attitude but scrape the surface and it’s a bit morbid in there.

Mmmm I’m getting a bit dark here. Sorry! Some of my fiction, particularly, the Dragon Wine series is me processing stuff that happened in the world so yeah dark fantasy. Luckily, I also write lighter stuff so I do have an imagination after all. I think I write to escape. I used to escape into daydreams before I started to write. Now I don’t spend a lot of time daydreaming, I spend it writing. It’s a sanity valve.

I joined a book bundle called Into the Horizon with 22 other authors. It is coming out next year. That’s 22 novels in one bundle. It’s currently up for preorder.

Have a safe and happy holiday season.