North Pole High: Excerpt & HUGE Giveaway!

Hello there beautiful readers. Did you realize that we are less than three months away from Christmas!? Squee! If you are anything like me, then you love that certain change in the fall where the soft rock stations turn to Christmas carols, people start decorating their houses full of pretty lights, and you start planning that special, perfect gift for that special someone in your life.

Now, my good ole pal Candycane Claus- author of the hilarious Christmas romp North Pole High and daughter of the one and only Santa Claus- is having one super duper fantastic giveaway that can help get you that special gift for that loving someone. (Or yourself. We promise not to judge. It's a pretty sweet prize after all.) Now before I tell you what you can win, let's go over the contest itself so you can find out how to snag this contest and get into full Christmas Spirit mode!

Giveaway Rules & How to Enter!:

YOUR ASSIGNMENT

Post a short video to YouTube about how hot chocolate it would be to go to school in the North Pole with Santa's daughter, Candycane Claus, as one of your classmates.

You can shoot a vlog, write and perform a song, put on a skit with your friends, or any creative, fun, silly thing you can think of, but the video must reference the North Pole High books in some way.

WHAT CAN YOU WIN?

Prizes include the brand new KINDLE FIRE HD 6 PLUS a ONE-YEAR subscription to AMAZON PRIME, A ROKU streaming stick, and a crazy delicious haul of Christmas candy!

DETAILS

For the complete list of rules, sign up information, judging information (including the Hollywood judging panel!), FAQs, and all that other lovely detailed goodness, head on over to Candy's blog post by clicking here!

I and Bitches n Prose blog are in no way affiliated with this prize. I'm simply helping to spread the word about an awesome giveaway. If you have any questions, please contact Candy by clicking the above link. Thanks!

Now, while plotting with Candy, she was awesome enough to send me an excerpt from her lovely book North Pole High. This scene is one of my favorites!

Excerpt:

Dear Jillyn,

I am so honored to be back here at Bitches n Prose to present this exclusive excerpt from my book, North Pole High: A Rebel Without a Claus – a memoir by Candace Jane Kringle, the true story of a boy who hates Christmas but is forced to build a Christmas tree for a school project with Santa’s daughter, Candycane Claus (also known as “me”). I hope your readers enjoy it.

# # #
The Art of Designing Christmas Trees

We worked in near total silence. Perched between us on a corner of the dining room table, our two-foot-tall prototype shaded our view of each other. I worked on my half, he worked on his. Not very conducive to true teamwork. And by that I mean I couldn’t easily check his work and fix his mistakes. I much preferred sitting side-by-side, like at his place, but it would have been awkward to get up and move.
As we painted our model, my candy cane theme merged surprisingly well with his, shall we say, darker imagery. We had discovered that bringing in one ultra-fine ribbon of raspberry-red flowers, nestled up the center of the thickest twirly lane of black roses, gave our tree a sense of dressed-up stylishness.

I set down my brush and took a moment to admire the overall flow. The colored line bent gracefully up the gentle slope of the feathery triangle. She was a beauty all right, but something was missing. I paged through our sketchbook for clues. A skull stared at me from Rudy’s first drawing. A small piece of Christmas, buried alive inside the boy’s head. I had to find a way to incorporate that icky drawing into our project. To make it a symbolic representation of that thing that, if it existed in him, exists in everyone. If our tree could say all that, it would be truly enchanted.

“What if we made them shiny!” I yelped. “In gold and silver and red and green. Like traditional glass-ball ornaments. Transparent ones too!” I sputtered out crazy, disconnected ideas. Tiny, shiny skulls would dot our tree, sparingly, endowing it with a subtle message of inner tranquility as the pathway to global harmony or something precious like that.

Rudy dug into his pocket and produced two peppermint balls wrapped in cellophane—the kind you take from the little dish by the cash register when you’re leaving a restaurant—and plopped them onto the table in front of me.

“Are you trying to tell me I have bad breath?” I asked.

“Eyeballs,” he said.

“I have bad eyeballs?”

Rudy laughed. It was rare that I could make him laugh. Laughing looked nice on him. “No, we can use these as eyeballs for the skulls.” He grabbed his notebook and started sketching furiously.

“You’re making fun of me.”

“No I’m not.” He turned the sketchpad around to show me.

I felt prickly all over. He had engraved an adorable pair of candy-cane-striped eyeballs onto the skull. He’d never responded so enthusiastically to any of my ideas before.

“I figured if we’re gonna put a face on this thing, we gotta keep the candy-cane theme going.”

My cheeks burned. I must have gone twelve-and-a-half shades of red. “Shut up. You’re not supposed to be funny. My dad said so.”

“Oh, yeah?” The corners of his mouth turned slightly upward.

“Yeah. He came into my room and asked me if you ever tried any ‘funny business.’”

Rudy leaned forward, holding back a chuckle. “What did you tell him?”

“That you’re a poo-head and I hate you and I’m never talking to you again.” I stuck out my tongue.

“Have an eyeball, Candy.” He flipped one of the after-dinner mints at me. “You need it. You have poo breath.”

“No I don’t. You’re nothing but poo!” I flung the hard candy back at him with rotten aim, then tickled him below the ribs when he wasn’t looking, just as I might have if I’d been hanging out with Tinsel.

Rudy flinched. He whipped around and got me right back. With both hands. I squeaked and gave him another prickle on his knee, which flew up and banged against the table, making our tree hiccup. He returned fire on my thigh. I squeaked again. Rudy was finally having fun, like a normal Polean.

I was calculating my next counter-attack when I heard the more-scary-than-jolly, “Ho-ho-ho. Hello, children.”

We choked back our giggles and cease-fired our merriment.

“Hi, Daddy. What’s up?”

# # #

Now it’s your turn. Are you ready to work on a fun Christmas project? Enter the North Pole High Video Contest and you can win a Kindle Fire HD6 and one year of Amazon Prime or other fun prizes! It should be easy without Santa breathing down your neck.

Contest Link: http://www.northpolehigh.com/p/contest.html

Now that you've gotten a taste of the book and the Christmas spirit, go forth and enter, my lovelies! You can check out my interview with Candy as well as my review of North Pole High here on my blog. If you've already read this book, check out my review of North Pole High: Beginnings, a novella with full of character backstories.

Buy a copy by clicking here!

Good luck and get filming!