Nearer to Spring: A Story of Christmas Lost and Found in Letters

What happens when Christmas gets lost? Discouraged with Christmas—the commercialism, the family fatigue, and the fading appearance of cards and letters—Anne Koch vows to cast Christmas away. The short essays assembled here trace her transformation from fed up to fascinated and exhausted to encouraged as she revisits decades of holiday mail, spurred on by a chance meeting with a garage spider and an encounter with her childhood copy of E.B. White’s Charlotte’s Web. For anyone who thinks Christmas is obsolete, inconvenient, or simply a season of empty sentiments employed by master marketers to lure people into a world of more—a world where technology has made cards and letters irrelevant, this book tells a different story.