Unlike The Last Christmas Show, this is a Christmas novel, one I bought in September 2024 to spread among my stacks so when the season rolled around I would be able to find a Christmas novel to read as is my wont.
This short book (181 pages, but the print surface of them is small) is a fantasy novel wrapped in a frame story. In the frame story, a father of a family whose children have become teenagers tries to get them to participate in the family Christmas traditions, but they resist, so he tells them the story that is the bulk of the book. In that story, a young man with little Christmas spirit (much like the family in the frame story) cuts across a wood in the snow so he’s not late home falls into the snow globe he’d received as a gift. Within it, the meaning of Christmas is lost; he comes upon a city with the craziest enforced holiday cheer and consumerism (lots of puns about Christmas traditions abound, making it not unlike Rickshaw Riot in that way). To get home, the boy must befriend a young lady whose relation lives in the castle on the hill who provided the spirit of Christmas but has given up. And, doncha know it, he saves two or three Christmases that way (in the snow globe, in the boy’s own family, and in the frame story by serving as an example–and it is the dad from the frame story who had this adventure in the first place).
I mean, it’s nice and all, what you expect from a Christmas novel. I guess it didn’t take off–it didn’t become a series as so many other titles like it did–and it did come with a CD sampler of Mannheim Steamroller Christmas songs. It was sealed, and I started to unseal it, but I realized it was a sampler and had no new music on it, and I already have most or all of it on CD, so I preserved the collectibility of the book. Which is not likely to be that collectible at all. Apparently they’re five to ten bucks on Ebay.
Still, by getting started early, I might get in more than one Christmas novel this season. Or I’ll clutter my reading with the rest of the Ben Wolf books I have. Maybe both.
