Hard Candy Christmas

Christmas 1997 was the last straw. Linda Simran Harvey went home and wrote "Four Drunks and a Dog." She felt better afterwards, so gradually she wrote about twenty-six more Christmases. The result is a modern Christmas memoir spanning fifty years, from a magical moment in a sad childhood to middle-aged angst, from a Christmas Eve wedding where the guests have misgivings to the gift of peace between two former spouses. In a class by itself is the memory of a perfect Christmas in February. Unfolding throughout the years is a spiritual journey and a saga of adoption loss and reunion, refusing to be neatly resolved. Nor do other relationships always sort themselves out in tidy packets. This is a real life. But along with the failures of Christmas expectations are love and connection with the human and the divine, just not in the perfect way of holiday specials and other people´s annual Christmas letters.