Jane Christmas

Jane Christmas (born 1954) is a Canadian travel writer,[1][2] who was a shortlisted nominee for the Stephen Leacock Award and the Word Awards in 2014 for her memoir And Then There Were Nuns.[3] The book chronicles a year she spent in various convents while deciding whether to marry for a third time or to take up a vocation as an Anglican nun.[1] In 2011, she was accepted as an associate with the Canadian Anglican religious community, the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine.

Christmas was born and raised in Toronto, Ontario to an Anglican father and a Roman Catholic mother. Her father John Grimshaw was a newspaper reporter with The Canadian Press before joining the field of public relations as one of its early practitioners.[2] Her mother Valeria was also a reporter and editor (The Canadian Press, Don Mills Mirror).[2] She was educated at St. Clement's School and Loretto Abbey, and graduated from Carleton University with a Bachelor of Arts (English and History).[2] Moving to Hamilton, Ontario, she began a long career as a newspaper editor and journalist,[4] working for Canadian Press, The Globe and Mail, the Hamilton Spectator and the National Post, and later as a public relations manager in the public sector, before devoting her time exclusively to writing. A founding member of the Hamilton Civic League, she remained in the city for more than 20 years. She currently lives in England.

She has published five books of what has been categorised as travel writing but of which she prefers to call journey memoir,[4] and co-wrote A Journey Just Begun (2015) for the Sisterhood of St. John the Divine in Toronto.