How One Book Saved My Family Christmas
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Every Christmas, my far-flung family gathers for a week at our parents’ cabin. The cabin is remote, rustic, and made of real logs. The family comes from places as distant as Alaska, California, New York, and Idaho. There used to be five of us. Now with kids, spouses, and a few ex-spouses, we are 12. Plus three dogs.
The days are simple. We sit around by the fire, eat, sit around the fire, eat, sit around by the fire, and maybe, just before dark, squeeze in a walk through the woods. In regular life, we all have different political beliefs. Some of us are religious. Some are not. Some think eating chicken for dinner counts as a vegetarian option. Some have an unnatural attachment to the Buffalo Bills.
And yet we do not argue about these topics during dinner. Nor do we bring up “the time Leigh crashed Dad’s pickup into the side of the house.” If these subjects ever come up, one of us safely diverts the conversation to something more festive—the book all of us are reading together.
There is always a lot to say. Maybe someone read 50 pages last night. Maybe someone else quit reading, bored out of her mind. Maybe someone didn’t understand how the blind girl got home safely from the bakery if the Nazis were hunting her (see: All The Light We Cannot See, by Anthony Doerr ), while someone now wishes to visit France to see the D-Day beaches. And till another someone—okay, me—suspected that the jewel was hidden in the map of Saint-Malo the whole time and feels the need to brag during breakfast.
Here’s how our system works. Each year, one person picks a book and purchases it for every member of the family. The title is a surprise, revealed on the first day of everyone’s arrival.
This year, we are reading Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan. It’s the story of an Irish family during a Christmas in 1985. The father of the family, a coal merchant, discovers a secret hidden behind the closed walls of the powerful village convent.
The book is exquisitely written and so atmospheric—full of fresh snow and cakes made from candied cherries and tiny stars falling in the dark “leaving a streak like a chalk mark on a board for just a second.” Unlike many stories, this one isn’t about good people doing the wrong thing but, instead, good people doing the right thing—and the unexpected consequences.
Small Things Like These, I suspect, will be a big hit with the family. First and foremost, it’s only 114 pages! Everyone, even Aunt Sarah, will finish. Second, the books will be distributed with the name of the reader already written on the inside of the cover so that copies will not get mixed up, leading to arguments between siblings and bickering about whether dog-earing pages is allowed.
Thirdly, the person who picked Small Things Like These has actually read the book. (Several years ago, this person—okay, also me—picked a book about a whaling trip to the Arctic, thinking that everyone loved adventure stories. Unfortunately, she had read only reviews of the book and did not know that a small child is assaulted in the first chapter, causing every member of her family to quit, horrified.) Lastly, though Keegan’s novel is an adult book, it’s also wonderful to read aloud, even with children present. Which is the most fun thing about a family book club—sitting around by the fire, reading the story to each other, with a plate of freshly frosted cookies.
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