Get a head start on those “Christmas Letters”
Book Review
Christmas Letters
By Debbie Macomber
MIRA Books
$16.95 hardbound
By BILL DUNCAN
The News-Review
Long before Debbie Macomber became a best selling writer, she wrote an annual Christmas letter to friends and family. She remembers that the response she received from those early letters encouraged her to become a professional writer.
If you have read any of Macomber’s romantic comedies, you must know that those Christmas letters she wrote back then had a powerful punch. In a telephone interview with her at her office in Port Orchard, Wash. she said that writing a special book about Christmas for her readers "has become a tradition. I want to give my readers a reason to laugh during those normally tense weeks. Nothing would please me more than to know that ‘Christmas Letters’ brought a smile to the reader’s face."
Since each year for the past three years she has written a romantic comedy, it was almost natural that she’d work Christmas letters into a book plot. "I was rummaging through ideas for my next Christmas book, when I remembered those Christmas letters and thought writing Christmas letters as a business might be an enterprising idea for someone."
That someone in her book is her heroine, Katherine O’Connor, whom she calls K.O., an unemployed single woman who needs money to pay for her rent and food and earns it by writing other people’s Christmas letters while waiting for a job opening. "Christmas Letters" is a fast moving saga, written in Debbie Macomber’s masterful way with words and humorous plots.
It was while writing those Christmas letters that K.O. meets Dr. Wynn Jeffries, a learned professor who is the product of hippie parents who allowed him to grow up in an undisciplined lifestyle. He believes that lifestyle is the correct way to bring up children. That led him to write a best selling book called "The Free Child," advocating undisciplined child rearing methods.
K.O.’s sister, Zelda, the mother of five-year-old twin girls, has adopted his methods and K.O. sees that as disaster for her nieces.
She discovers Dr. Jefferies, a bachelor, lives in the same condo complex as she does, which leads her to a confrontation over his book when she runs into him in a coffee shop. It is a very public and loud confrontation.
K.O.’s condo neighbor, LaVonne, claims to have psychic powers and sees something in the cat litter box that suggests she should invite Dr. Jefferies and K.O. to a party in her condo. She has arranged for the two to have dinner at a swank restaurant in Seattle. It is, at first, a reluctant agreement on the part of Dr. Jefferies and K.O., but as the evening unfolds they discover a different side of each other.
In Macomber’s convoluted plot they fall in love, but continue to disagree over child rearing, especially when Dr. Jefferies’ book is recommending parents never involve their children in the Santa Claus myth. His suggestion is to bury Santa under his sleigh.
K.O. convinces Dr. Jefferies to spend a weekend at her sister’s house and help tend to the twins while her sister and brother-in-law take a much needed R&R from the twins.
It is a hilarious weekend, leading to a breakup of K.O. and Dr. Jefferies over the theory of child rearing. The reader will come to the conclusion that this romance is forever ended, but psychic matchmaker LaVonne has seen a new protent in her raisin bran and thus, a happy ending to a very funny romantic comedy.
It will make you smile and perhaps even enjoy those dreaded Christmas letters you know you will find in your mail box again this season. You can get a head start by reading Debbie Macomber’s "Christmas Letters."
(Bill Duncan is the editor of The Senior Times. He also writes a weekly column each Thursday on the Opinion Page.)