Miracles for Christmas

A Book of Christmas Miracles, edited by Amy Newmark
I was a little dismayed when I read that the stories here had been taken from other volumes of the "Chicken Soup" series, but it turned out very few stories were from previous Christmas editions, but were from books I didn't read, including a couple of Canadian editions. So most of the stories were new to me. There were a few from Thanksgiving, and several from Hanukkah (including a miraculous story about a stolen menorah), and even New Year tossed in. Strangers unaware, animal angels, new starts in life, needed money arriving in the nick of time, family reunions, unexpected gifts, emotional revelations—they're all here.

I was especially taken by the penultimate story, "The Secret of the Cedar Chest." In this memory, a woman named Gail is talking about her lifelong book obsession, from when she was a girl asking her mom "did you bring me a book?" Her mom always bought her books for Christmas and hid them in a cedar chest in her bedroom, and Gail talks about having discovered the hiding place and sneaking into her parents' room when they were watching TV and reading the books ahead of time.

I had to laugh, because Mom always bought me a book for a good report card and eventually I discovered where she hid them until report card time. She would go to sewing class every Tuesday and I would go in her bedroom and dig under the stockings in the right corner of the bottom drawer of the dresser and carefully take out the book, read it a little, then put it back exactly how I found it. I remember having almost finished Green Grass of Wyoming by the time report cards came out.

(Green Grass of Wyoming had been a little miracle anyway because we took a wrong turn one Sunday going to Diamond Hill [a skiing area in winter] for the concerts they used to have there, and stopped by this drugstore for some reason [we could never find that store again, either]. I found Green Grass of Wyoming on the spinner rack and was surprised because I never knew My Friend Flicka and Thunderhead were part of a trilogy. So I talked Mom into buying it for my next report card and then read most of it on Tuesday afternoons, because I couldn't wait to see what happened to Ken and Carey—and of course Thunderhead!)

It was a very personal memory in a very enjoyed series.