5 Plays, a Story, and a Novella for Christmas

It’s that time of year for last-minute gift buying, wrapping presents, decorating trees, family celebrations, and reading stories about Christmas. Christmas isn’t only about an abundance of choices for gifts; it’s also the time of the year for an abundance of seasonal choices for reading. You can reach for old favorites like A Christmas Carol or any of the other Charles Dickens Christmas stories, or a shorter work like A Child’s Christmas in Wales by Dylan Thomas.

You can also look at genre books about Christmas – science fiction stories, horror, stories, murder mysteries (lots of murder mysteries), and even celebrate the season with your favorite zombie (yes, there are stories about zombies and Christmas).

To see how Christmas is being treated by contemporary writers, I did a kind of random selection and read a collection of plays, a novella, and a short story. I learned that if there if is one common characteristic in Christmas stories, it’s how wildly diverse they are. These selections are not meant to be representative; I don’t think it’s possible to find representative works of Christmas stories in all of their sub-genres.

Five Christmas Plays

Writer David Winters has written about faith and work (Taking God to Work; Sabbatical of the Mind) and a mystery (Driver Confessional). He’s also written Five Christmas Plays, short theatrical works designed specifically for churches to use as part of their Christmas observances. 

“The Singing Trees” is about having an obsession for the perfect Christmas – the right decorations, the right food, the right table settings, the right everything – and what happens when it all blows up. “I’ll Be Late for Christmas” is about a family waiting for the father to return from his Army deployment, and he is way past his expected arrival. “Christmas Prayer of Forgiveness” is about a family broken by abandonment and divorce, and what happens when the father returns, seeking forgiveness. In “The Christmas Cabin,” a father brings home an unexpected guest – his daughter from a long-ago relationship. And “Grandma Louise’s Christmas Miracle” is about long-ago stories and the seeming impossibility of a contemporary miracle. 

Winters uses sentiment, humor (the waitresses in “I’ll Be Late for Christmas” are the kind of sassy servers you want to meet in small-town diners), empathy, understanding, and basic principles of faith to tell his stories. Each of the five plays is a telling of the Christmas story in a different way.

Pieces on Earth

Author Cathy Bryant has written some 13 books of fiction (like the Miller’s Creek series) and non-fiction (Christian devotionals). Pieces on Earth is a novella that tells the story of Liv, a young Navy wife living in Pensacola with her husband Jeff and daughter Chesney. Jeff’s overseas tours of duty are supposed to be over, and Liv is looking forward to a Christmas with her parents and family in snowy Colorado. Jeff is suddenly ordered to Afghanistan (he’s a Navy pilot) and Liv’s plans are completely upset. Liv discovers she’s pregnant and is so angry with her husband that she chooses not to tell him before he leaves.

She’s a believing, practicing Christian, but she’s also angry with God for allowing her plans to be upset. She stops going to church and starts spending time with her more materialistic secular friends. One faith connection she keeps is telling Bible stories to four-year-old Chesney, helping the child understand the overall story of the Bible. She starts to worry when Jeff’s regular calls home stop; then a friend’s husband is reported killed in action and she learns her own husband is missing in action. 

Pieces on Earth is a poignant story of the waning and waxing of faith, how circumstances can seem overwhelming, and how God is always faithful.

Mystery of the Beautiful Old Friend

Michelle Ann Hollstein is the author of the Aggie Underhill mystery series, a fantasy trilogy, a paranormal mystery series, a novel, and several non-fiction books. In the short story “Mystery of the Beautiful Old Friend,” Aggie Underhill, a slightly past middle-aged woman living in Palm Springs, California, is sitting at lunch with her friends Betty Wilcox and Roger Dunlap when she sees her close, personal friend Tom Wood sitting at a nearby table, with a beautiful young woman. Aggie has no room for jealousy; she’s in love with Tom but not ready for marriage, so she’s told him that they should date other people. But one this beautiful?

To make herself feel better and to perhaps compete with the young beauty, Aggie dyes her hair. It’s supposed to be reddish highlights; it turns into fire-engine red, or, as her friend Roger says, “Woody Woodpecker red.” She and Betty go to the mall for Christmas shopping when they spot the beautiful young woman. In the middle of their spying, one of Santa’s elves is found murdered (bodies always seem to turn up when Aggie Underhill is around). 

“Mystery of the Beautiful Old Friend” focuses on the more commercial aspects of the Christmas season. It’s also a funny murder mystery; what goes through Aggie’s mind when she realizes what’s happened to her hair causes more than a few laughs.

Top photograph by Freestocks.org via Unsplash. Used with permission.

A Tale of Two Romances

Two novels. Two romance novels. Both offered for free as promotions of newer books in the series. Both published in the same year. Both with the same high rating on Amazon. Both set in Texas. Both set in rural Texas. Both involving recent widows. Both have a handsome man return to town.

And by about page 4, you know both are completely different.

I’ve said (admitted) (confessed) that I read the occasional romance novel. And I see a lot of promotions for free ebooks on Amazon (including my own on Fridays during January; that means today). I downloaded two novels, thinking that both of them were Christian romance novels. One of them was. One of them was not.

But it had been some time since I downloaded, and so over my long Christmas vacation I perused my Kindle. And found Cathy Bryant’s A Path Less Traveled, the second novel in her Miller Creek series. It falls into a sub-sub-genre – Contemporary Christian Western Romance (it’s set in Texas and the heroine lives on a ranch, so that makes it western, I suppose). It’s a simple, straightforward story.

Published in 2010, it wasn’t considered for the Pulitzer Prize or the National Book Award. But that wasn’t the author’s intention. Bryant wanted to tell a romantic story, and she succeeds admirably. Great literature, no. A good entertaining story, yes.

A young widow still grieving for her dead husband is trying to make a go of a design business in a small town. She’s not succeeding. Financially, she’s in over her head. She has a young son that she’s trying to be both mother and father to. Each day gets a little more desperate, but she stubbornly refuses to share her problems with family and friends. And then a lawyer comes to town for a wedding, a lawyer with his own personal baggage. He connects with the young boy. He wants to connect with the boy’s mother. She, however, is as stubborn as a Texas mule.

About the worst thing I could think of to say is that the reader sometimes wants to slap the heroine’s face and say “Girl, get with it!” But the story is a family-friendly type of read. It has 141 reviews on Amazon.

Then there was the other romance novel (if you want to know the title, email me; I don’t voluntarily publicize bad writing). I mistakenly thought that it, too, was a Christian romance. By page four, I hit the first “damn!” in the narrative. And I thought, well, I knew some Christian publishers are getting more edgy. By page seven I knew that no Christian publisher I had ever heard of was getting this edgy.

For the first four chapters, unconsummated lust – lust and nothing but lust – dripped off the pages. The writing was stilted. The writing, in fact, was superfluous.

I stopped reading. And then I looked to see how many reviews it had on Amazon.

More than 500.

I thought about what the editor H.L. Mencken once said: “You’ll never go broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.” Or underestimating bad taste, I would add. Or our appetite for coarseness.

That’s an old-fashioned word, coarseness. But it’s a good word to describe our culture. Our public rhetoric. The language we commonly use. The language even we Christians are commonly using. I once sat in a training seminar at my own church and heard a visiting pastor use language that he apparently thought made him cool, relevant and millennial. It didn’t. It was offensive.

If you want a nice, entertaining romance novel about rural Texas, read Cathy Bryant. Forget the coarse thing. We all be better off.

Photograph of the Texas state flag by Summer Woods via Public Domain Pictures. Used with permission.