Well, today is Good Friday — a day of both joy and great sadness to my Christian customers.  And it’s also the start of Passover — a week of celebration and remembering for my Jewish customers. So to both groups, I wish you lots of Chocolate bunnies and bitter herbs (okay, make that latke it tastes better). Later today, I’ll watch Jesus Christ Superstar with my family (a family ritual) and we’ll make prezels. Great, big fat ones that are covered in sea salt. And blow my diet right out the window.

One of the topics I’ve been writing on lately is inspiration. Given today (grrr, yes I’m working) the thought of family time and religious ceremony comes immediately to mind. And one of the best sources of inspiration is the family and times of celebration.

Sharing your family’s traditions can be both profitable and pleasurable.

Pleasurable of course, because you get to remember and relive those traditions as you write about them. Of course, some people will avoid the reliving. There are many, many books and eBooks out there that talk about recipes for Passover and Easter Sunday dinner and Christmas and Ramadan. But the very best of them do so from a personal and sharing stance.

People want to connect with you as a writer. They want to hear you in your writing. They want to know there is a person in there somewhere. That’s what turns a simple problem solving into a can’t put it down book.

So how does one connect on a personal level with a reader?

By sharing a story that truly matters. Tell them why this ritual means something to you. Tell them how your Mother always used to claim that it always rained on Good Friday. Or how your Grandfather would call the family to the Seder meal even when he had that terrible cold. Give them a glimpse of you as a person through a story.

And we all have stories around holidays — even if they are sad.

That’s one reason why people buy books around the holidays. Oh, sure, they always buy books to solve problems. That recipe they can’t remember. The search for something a little different this year. But what  turns their purchase into a favourite book is the personal connection they find with the author.

Now, you may have been told to focus on evergreen books — eBooks that sell forever. And books on a single holiday tend to sell right before the holiday. But they are seldom evergreen.

The trick is that books on a year’s worth of holidays sell throughout the year. And because they draw the reader into the author’s life, they tend to be evergreen. They don’t go out of style.

So what traditions can you write about?

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