The Twelve Stories of Christmas (Hardcover) (ISBN-13: 9781412202206)

In this book, the author offers a wide variety of Christmas short stories written over a 40-year span of time. Written for adults, these stories start with a Christmas letter created in 1965 and conclude with a story penned in 2003. Each timeless story is unique in its setting and offers a tug at the heart strings of the reader. Readers will find stories that take place in New York City, Appalachia, Bethlehem, Europe, and the mid-west. In each story, the characters are thoughtfully crafted to touch your heart with hope. Time and again, they return to the eternal message of the love of God, and to the gifts of human lives caught in common moments of time.

The cover design by Patsy Ashley Given, a personal friend of the author, with its velvet dark blues and purples invites one into a constellation of lights suggesting that moments of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries can light our pathways far into the future. Following each story, readers encounter an enchanting piece of artwork that serves as a visual exclamation point to a personal journey with the words of the author. It represents the intense depth encountered by the illustrator in response to the touching characters revealed in The Twelve Stories of Christmas.

This book would be a wonderful Christmas gift, as it will go on giving year after year. It could well find a permanent place on the coffee table to share gifts of hope for all seasons to its readers, and to remind each reader that all of us can make a divine difference within our common, very human moments of time.