Christmas Books

The naughty, the nice and the nauseating. Snowed in by the spawn of The Christmas Box.

By Katherine Whittemore

Dec 16, 1996 | snowdrifts. That's how all these pages seemed to me, thousands densely packed on the subject of Christmas, many wearisome to push through, some powdered with insight, but most pure slush at the core  and there I was, the one who must brave the endless ivory steppes, Zhivago-like, thinking how much nicer it would be to rip a few sheafs for kindling, watching the blue-hearted flame climb clear up to ... Sorry. But Christmas is such an onslaught. It may offer a few crystal moments of joy, if you're lucky, yet it's mostly a white-out of rampant capitalism and insidious family dynamics, and you know, why should publishing be different than life? Awful people and rotten books both inexplicably succeed, as evidenced by last year's "Bridges of Madison County"-with-snow bestseller, The Christmas Box, wherein a family learns a (bankable) Lesson About Love from a grandmotherly sort with a tragic (and also bankable) secret. But rotten books share the shelves, ecumenically, with decent ones. You have to keep slogging. You can only hope for small rewards. Sometimes you're happily surprised. Of all that I read, all the bleached drifts I plowed, novelist Edna O'Brien put it best: "I had not lost the desire to escape," she writes, "or the strenuous habit of hoping."

This great line (the "strenuous" clinches it) comes from "The Doll," one of twenty-seven entries in A Literary Christmas: Great Contemporary Christmas Stories. Being contemporary, they are a twinkle-deprived, depressive lot, which somehow makes them all the more welcome in a world of Tim Allen and aging Waltons. Less heartwarming than heart-instructing. Such tough stuff, of course, is sorely needed this time of year, when our families and dysfunctions join hands around the memory-laden table, and ask for second helpings, then third, only to wash it all down with insinuative behavior patterns that never seem to change. And to all a good night!