PN – Chicken Soup for the Soul Series. Theme: Winter Holidays

Christmas, Thanksgiving, Hanukkah, New Year’s

The deadline for submissions is APRIL 30, 2024.

Everyone loves the holidays and making cherished memories. Our holiday titles make wonderful gifts and are so popular that we create a new edition each year. We are now collecting stories for our 2024 HOLIDAY edition that will be published later this year.

How do you celebrate the holidays? Are your celebrations very traditional or are they very spontaneous and never the same? We want to hear how you celebrate your holidays. How do you gather with family and friends to share the special spirit of the season? How do you brighten those long winter days?

Please submit your true stories and poems about the entire December holiday season, including Thanksgiving, Christmas, Hanukkah, Kwanzaa, Boxing Day, and New Year’s festivities too. **If your stories are about celebrating Christmas please be sure that they are “Santa safe” so that we don’t spoil the magic for precocious readers!

***Please note: If you submitted a story or poem for a previous holiday book and we DID NOT publish it, here is your chance to submit it to us again. If you submitted a story and we DID publish it in a previous holiday book, please do not submit it again. We will not publish it again.

Here are some suggested topics, but we know you can think of many more:

– What celebrating the holidays means to me
– Holiday traditions
– Memories of the holiday season
– The love of family
– Family reunions
– Holiday humor
– Gift giving
– Gift receiving
– Regifting – oh no!
– Decorating… oh how we love to do that!
– Un-decorating… oh how we hate to do that!
– Eat, Eat, Eat… and be merry
– Christmas through the eyes of a child
– Elf on the Shelf fun and games
– Here comes Santa Claus
– Secret Santa fun
– Things that went wrong!
– Holiday food and traditions
– Neighborhood competition for house decorations
– The spontaneous things your family has done
– Funny anecdotes

Guidelines for a Chicken Soup for the Soul story

1. Tell an exciting, heartwarming or funny story about something that has happened to you or someone you know. Your story should be written in the first person and should be about yourself or someone close to you.
2. Tell your story in a way that will make the reader cry, laugh, get goose bumps or say “Wow!”
3. The story should start “in the action” and draw in the reader. Do not start your story with an introduction about what you are going to say, or end with a concluding paragraph about what you just said.
4. Don’t be afraid to speak from the heart. Many people tell personal stories for the first time in our books, and they find it to be a cathartic and productive experience. We do let you use a pen name for your story if you do not want to use your real name.
5. Don’t try fancy moves with tenses. Writing in the present tense about something that happened in the past rarely works.
6. Keep your story to 1200 words or less. Tighten, tighten, tighten!
7. Your story must be true. No fiction, no creative writing.

What a Chicken Soup for the Soul story IS NOT:

1. A sermon, an essay or eulogy.
2. An “as told to” story written by you for someone else. If you ghost-write a story for someone, we thank you for helping that person share his or her story. That person’s name will be listed as the author and he or she can acknowledge your help in the bio section.
3. A term paper, thesis, letter or journal entry.
4. About politics or controversial issues.
5. A biography or testimonial.
6. A journalistic article about a third party that reads like a newspaper article.

Guidelines for a Chicken Soup for the Soul poem

1. We love poems that tell a story. A Chicken Soup for the Soul poem does the same job as a story. The reader goes away having learned your story, just through poetry instead of prose.
2. We do not publish poems that do not tell a story.
3. We also do not publish poems that seem overly focused on rhyming and read more like greeting cards.

A few more tips about submitting

1. The only way to submit your stories or poems to us is via our website. If you have any problems when trying to fill out the form and submit your work, please contact our webmaster at: webmaster@chickensoupforthesoul.com. Responses from the webmaster usually take several days, so be patient.
2. Our webmaster cannot help you with your personal computer problems. If you have questions, such as, “How do I paste my story into the submission form?” please ask a friend or relative, not our webmaster.
3. Please submit only stories or poems that have not been previously published. The only exception to this is if your work has only been published in a small local publication with limited circulation or on your own blog.
4. Please do not send us any book manuscripts, unless through a literary agent, as these will be automatically discarded. Also, we do not accept title ideas from the public. If we receive any, they will be discarded and will not be shown to an editor.