Christmas

One final Christmas wish could change their lives forever… Nora Connors Rainer has returned to her hometown, Linden Corners, to tend to her elderly but spunky pie-baking mother—and to nurse a broken heart. To keep busy, Nora opens “A Doll’s Attic,” a consignment shop where locals can unload their unwanted heirlooms. And the upcoming holidays are bringing a host of interesting objects—and people—through her doors. Eighty-five year old Thomas Van Diver hands Nora her first challenge: track down a rare, vintage item that holds powerful childhood memories for him—memories of his father and their last Christmas together before he went off to war and never returned. Helping them both is Brian Duncan, whose farmhouse and windmill Thomas once called home. Together with his irrepressible young charge, Janey Sullivan, Brian will uncover the mysteries of Christmas past—and create a Christmas present that just might restore their hope, and fulfill everyon’es deepest wishes.

Christmas is a time for remembering…. Too bad all memories aren't pleasant. Everyone in Whiskey Creek remembers Sophia DeBussi as the town's Mean Girl. Especially Ted Dixon, whose love she once scorned. But Sophia has paid the price for her youthful transgressions. The man she did marry was rich and powerful but abusive. So when he goes missing, she secretly hopes he'll never come back—until she learns that he died running from an FBI probe of his investment firm. Not only has he left Sophia penniless, he's left her to face all the townspeople he cheated…. Sophia is reduced to looking for any kind of work to pay the bills and support her daughter. With no other options, she becomes housekeeper for none other than Ted, now a successful suspense writer. He can't bring himself to turn his back on her, not at Christmas, but he refuses to get emotionally involved. He learned his lesson the last time. Or will the season of love and forgiveness give them both another chance at happiness?

Kevin Morrell is a forty-three-year-old husband and father who runs a successful design and marketing firm that's crashed into the suffering economy. Attempting to navigate the busyness of the mall at Christmas, Kevin is humbled when he stumbles across the Salvation Army's Angel Tree Project. His wife insists that he take a paper ornament. The name on the ornament is Thomas Brandt, a fifteen-year-old still reeling from the implosion of his family—from years of verbal abuse from an alcoholic father to a mother who finally left him behind, only to find herself and her children penniless and struggling. The only thing has allowed Lynn to survive is her faith. Thomas shares that faith, but he also wonders why God has seemingly abandoned them. This is the story about a man and a boy one December. A man whose life is changed by a simple expression of kindness, and a boy who takes that expression of kindness and shows the true meaning of Christmas.