Mobile Press Register, Sunday, December 07, 2008
Reviewed by JIM ROBERTSON Special to the Press-Register
"Christmas is a Season! 2008," an anthology of short stories and essays collected from 28 writers in 11 states. Christmas 2008 may be a time of challenges for many of us, but these accounts of Christmases past offer hope, joy and reconciliation even in the midst of great difficulties, as in one writer's eyewitness account as a 15-year-old of the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor just weeks before Christmas, or the flight of a potential suicide on Christmas Day.
The stories are multifaceted, some reflective, others challenging and still others with a whiff of whimsy. Some of the authors relate fond memories of traditions that younger generations may not know, and others detail the mischief that children can bring in their excitement over St. Nick's impending arrival.
Although many of the stories stir ideas of Currier & Ives vignettes, "Christmas is a Season! 2008" delves more often into the soul of the season. Dee Jordan's essay "The Grinch Who Didn't Steal Christmas" reflects on a recently divorced woman's first Christmas without her daughter and her inventive, unusual decision to take a round-trip flight to New York to fill the day. Kathleen Whitman Plucker's recounting of a delayed Christmas takes a different tack, moving the celebration to a different day entirely. An act of kindness to a stranger stranded in her car on a cold, snowy Michigan Christmas Eve is the focus of Joan Donaldson's essay, reminding those fortunate enough to have family near that many others face the season without such comfort, and that an act of generosity may find special, unspoken appreciation.
Some of the offerings jolt the reader, as occurs in Joyce Scarbrough's short story "Hope Chest," in which a young girl and her widower father confront Christmas without her mother. Tracy Hurley's "Matryoshka Dolls" opens with less than a warm-fuzzy feeling as a recalcitrant teen and her latest set of foster parents struggle to understand one another, but the journey of the story shows that Christmas offers a chance to take risks of the heart.
One of the most intriguing stories is Mobilian Cece Redmond's piece on traveling to Queensland, Australia, to celebrate a 95-degree Christmas down under with her Aussie in-laws kangaroos pulling Santa's sleigh is just the start of her adventure, which includes a crocodile. A "crikey!" Christmas, indeed! Mahala Church's memories of a 1950s Christmas at her grandparents' home in north Alabama, humorously and lovingly rendered in "Wonders Never Cease," span a different divide more than half a century to a world that many younger folks will find just as foreign.
Fiction or essay, contemporary or historical, cozy or compelling, the tapestry of the book finds its strength in all the ways that "the Christmas story" can be told. This collection challenges the reader to rethink what the season promises and what it can deliver, if only we'll allow it.
Jim Robertson is an attorney and a writer who lives in Mobile. --Mobile Press Register, Sunday, December 07, 2008
