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Contributors
The main creators of A Fairy-Tale Christmas

KAREN ANDERSON, author and stylist. The former style editor of Faith & Family magazine, Karen also produced a nationally distributed weekly radio segment on celebrating holidays throughout the year.
Karen has been interested in style, crafts, and design since she was old enough to hold a bottle of glue. At the age of 17 she won a Rutgers University Emerging Artist Award for jewelry design. She attended Thomas More College in New Hampshire, including a semester at the college’s campus in Rome, studying art, architecture, literature, and philosophy. She later studied fashion at the Parson’s School of Design campus in Paris. She has taught art, religion, and history classes privately and at Landmark Academy in Wilton, Conn., and taught adult classes in jewelry design, metalsmithing, and folk arts at regional art centers.
Raising her family in a nineteenth-century miller’s house in upstate New York has fed Mrs. Anderson’s relentless enthusiasm for history, feasts, and fairy tales.

Karen got the idea to write A Fairy-Tale Christmas when a friend told her that Lyndhurst—a castle-style mansion in Tarrytown, New York—had put up some spectacular decorations for the Christmas holidays, and that admission was free that day. Karen piled the Andersons' (many) kids in the car and took off for Tarrytown.

Once Karen saw what designer Bob Pesce (see bio) had created at the house, she decided it must be a book. Her husband and editor, Duncan Maxwell Anderson, contacted Marisa Bulzone, then Executive Editor at Stewart, Tabori & Chang, who jumped on the idea enthusiastically. After an 18-month adventure studying fairy-tales, decorating strategies, and Christmas traditions, A Fairy-Tale Christmas was born.

BRYAN E. McCAY (pictured at right), principal photographer and art director. Bryan was the founding art director for Victoria (Karen's favorite magazine of all time) and took the photographs for all Mary Carol Garrity’s “Nell Hill” decorating books.

ROBERT A. PESCE, exhibit designer. Bob creates the annual Christmas display at Lyndhurst (see below). A designer of commercial spaces, he has also decorated the mansion of the U.S. Vice President and the Christmas display at Washington's Kennedy Center.
You can send a message to Bob by clicking on his name above.

LYNDHURST (Tarrytown, N.Y.), where the photographs in A Fairy-Tale Christmas were taken, is a "Gothic Revival" mansion completed in 1842. It was designed by Alexander Jackson Davis (1803–1892), the foremost American architect of his day, for William Paulding, the former mayor of New York. It was expanded several times in keeping with its medieval castle style, and reached its current form after it was bought by railroad baron and finance genius Jay Gould (1836–1892). Gould's daughter Anna bequeathed the house and grounds to the National Trust for Historic Preservation, a Washington-based foundation that maintains properties important to our cultural heritage.

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