by Noella Noelophile®
Hooray! I found one!
While there’s no shortage of newer Christmas books, it seems lately that most are romances. And while that’s fun, I often find myself wishing for the more traditional Christmas stories of traditions, giving, and Chrismas spirit.
Chicken Soup for the Soul to the rescue! I love this series anyway, but the recent Christmas edition has just a little extra sparkle.
Published by Amy Newmark in October of 2020, Christmas is in the Air features 101 Christmas stories. These explore Christmas from multiple perspectives.
Military life at Christmastime, surviving the first Christmas after a major life change, and the birth of new traditions are all circumstances into which the storytellers take you.
You’ll almost feel the biting cold of a Christmas Eve on a New York street, or find yourself sitting up straighter as a roomful of Marines file past for a Christmas treat.
There are also unique perspectives such as one of my personal favorites: “A Second Chance at Childhood’, written by Kristen Mai Pham, who fled Communist Vietnam with her family at the age of four. And the addition of Hanukkah selections such as “Menorah Memories” by Maxwell Bauman offer a glance into traditions with which you may not be as familiar, but all of which celebrate family, tradition and creativity. (And if you are a parent especially, try hard not to smile when you read Rob Goldberg’s The Hanukkah Story. That may prove impossible!)
Christmas is in the Air also includes a number of traditions, often on-the-spot ones unique to the storyteller’s family, that you may just want to adopt.
All in all, reading this recent Chicken Soup for the Soul offering felt very much like having tried to eat just one of my grandmother’s incredible Christmastime chocolate cookies. (You can probably guess how that turned out!)