During their annual Christmas celebrations, a Nantucket family faces surprising news and unexpected decisions in this warm and inviting holiday novel by New York Times bestselling author Nancy Thayer.
The Nantucket Christmas Stroll is the most wonderful time of year on the island, filled with holiday cheer and festive decorations. Excited holidaymakers crowd the streets, Santa arrives on a Coast Guard boat, carolers serenade with classic Christmas carols, and shop windows glitter with treasures, twinkling lights, and merry displays.
At the heart of this celebration is the Parsons family and the sparkling house party they host each year. Brick Parsons and his wife, Jane, eagerly anticipate the arrival of their three adult children, Lydia, Florence, and Lucas, who are all coming home for the holidays.
Lydia, a successful hospitality professional, is torn between her career in New York and her new relationship with her uber-wealthy cosmopolitan boyfriend. Florie, the ambitious middle child, is madly in love with a handsome poet who wants her to move to his hometown in Wisconsin. Lucas, the golden boy, has decided to switch his career path, and is fearful of his father's reaction.
Together, the family celebrates the Stroll, reuniting with old friends and lovers on the tree-lit Main Street. But the holiday cheer is soon overshadowed by the stress of the season as secrets are revealed and emotions run high.
Champagne flows and Christmas-themed canapes are enjoyed as the Parsons family come together on the night of the party, proving that family and the power of love can make any season bright.
Release date:
September 29, 2026
Publisher:
Ballantine Books
Print pages:
288
* BingeBooks earns revenue from qualifying purchases as an Amazon Associate as well as from other retail partners.
It was the weekend of the Nantucket Christmas Stroll. The Coast Guard had hung an enormous Christmas wreath on the Brant Point Lighthouse. The small wooden Killen dory, fancied up with a miniature, brightly lit Christmas tree, bobbed in the cold sheltered waters of the Easy Street Basin. The few boats anchored in the harbor twined twinkling lights up their masts. Short fat evergreens paraded up and down the town sidewalks, wrapped with lights and handmade decorations—Popsicle stick stars, seashells, and sandcastles from the elementary school kids. And dog treats, catnip mice, and tiny bags of birdseed decorated by the animal shelter. And orange life-saver rings, wooden buoys, ropes tied in clove hitch, bowline, and reef knots, with a sign saying, wear your life jackets! came from the Coast Guard. Shop windows gleamed with winter scenes of snowmen and reindeer and presents wrapped in foil. Wreaths hung on shop doors and the air smelled of cinnamon, salt, and hot buttered rum.
Jane and Brick Three Parsons had festooned their house for the Stroll and now they sat in their warm car in their driveway, relaxing before the holiday hurry and flurry began. Their large living room window framed the tall Scotch pine they had wrestled into a heavy wooden stand, draped with lights, and hung with ornaments.
Also, they’d just returned from the doctor’s office.
Jane said, “The children arrive tonight,” and her voice shook just a little.
“When do you want to tell them?” Brick Three asked. Reaching over, he took her hand in his.
“I don’t want to spoil Stroll weekend.” Jane unsnapped her seatbelt and shifted around so she could face her husband. How very odd, she suddenly felt shy with Brick Three, as if they had only just met. She knew she was blushing.
Brick Three was concerned. “Why would the news spoil the weekend?”
Jane tried to gather her thoughts. “I may be overly sensitive, but our Stroll party has always been about the kids. We didn’t even have the first one until Lydia was seven.” She nodded her head, reflecting. “That year Florie was six and Lucas was five.”
“We couldn’t afford to have it until then,” Brick reminded her.
“True. But the party has always been for the kids and their friends and their friends’ parents—”
“—and our friends and my father and mother and their friends,” Brick added.
“We do invite a lot of people,” Jane agreed.
“But I understand.” Brick Three gently touched Jane’s cheek. “Jane, our kids are grown up now. They’re all in college. Lydia gets her master’s and Florie graduates this spring. Only a few months away. Lucas is a junior. They’re—what’s the word? They’re launched.”
When Brick Three touched her cheek, Jane felt like a girl again, tingling with emotions and sensations she thought she’d forgotten. Her pregnancy—this baby—had brought them closer in the past week than they had been for years. Not that they hadn’t been happy with each other. They’d just been so busy. Brick Three ran his family’s insurance agency—with his seventy-six-year-old father looming over his shoulder. Jane worked on several town organizations and remained on call to help Brick Jr., Brick Three’s father, and his new wife, Beatrice. All that was wonderful, and life was good—and then Jane visited her doctor and suddenly life was getting even better—and definitely more complicated.
Jane shook herself into a more positive mood. “They are launched. Lydia will work for one of the Golden’s best hotels, although who knows where she’ll be placed and when she’ll be able to come home. Lucas will work at our company when he graduates but that’s not for two years. Still, he’ll probably live with us. So, this will affect him.”
Brick Three nodded. “True. And Florie might be jealous. She says she wants to work for a large corporation and travel but keep Nantucket as her home base.”
Jane smiled. “Well, then . . .”
“You’re thinking the two younger ones might end up living with us on the island?”
“We can’t blame them for wanting to live here. There’s no place like it.”
“We’ve gotten off the subject,” Brick Three said. “Before anything, we have to decide whether or not we’ll tell them this weekend.”
“I can’t decide. It’s such unexpected, enormous news.”
“It’s going to happen, Jane. It’s been three months. Dr. Stone just told us that the ultrasounds show a healthy baby.”
Jane made a funny face at her husband. “Is it embarrassing that we’re going to have a baby at the age of forty-four?”
Brick Three made a funny face back. “Actually, I think we should be proud.”
“You’re right. And these days it’s not so unusual.” Jane picked up her handbag. “Let’s go in. We can decide over a nice cup of coffee.”
“Decaf,” Brick Three said.
Lydia
Was it true that the oldest child was always the most worried one? Lydia was the oldest of three and she was pretty sure that was true. Her younger sister, Florie, wanted to travel around the world, so she was getting a degree in business that would prepare her for working in an international company. The youngest child, her brother, Lucas, had known since he could walk and talk that he would join his father running the Parsons Insurance Company.
Which wasn’t fair.
It had been Lydia’s deepest desire to work for and eventually take over the family business. When she was a child, she eagerly accompanied her father on weekends when he went into his office. She found some discarded folders and manila envelopes in one of the office waste baskets, and she rescued them and knelt on a chair at a desk at the back of the room, writing away busily, even before she knew how to spell. Her father had printed her name with a Sharpie in huge letters onto a label and carefully smoothed the label onto the bottom drawer of the desk. She kept her “work” in that drawer and every time she got to go into the office, she shivered with delight when she opened the drawer and found her folders waiting there.
After Lucas was born, Lydia learned that her father and grandfather were thrilled because they wanted a boy to inherit the firm. One day she’d gone into her father’s office and discovered her label and all her work folders stuffed in the waste basket. Five-year-old Lucas had been given the desk.
“It’s the tradition that the male joins the firm,” her parents had told her.
It had broken her heart.
But she was, as her parents constantly reminded her, “a big girl,” and even if there had been times when she’d sat in the back of her closet weeping into an old dress because her own father didn’t value her enough to ask her to join the company—even if she had been hurt and angry and sorry for herself—she knew she had to figure out her life as it was in reality.
She decided she wanted to run a posh hotel like the ones on the island.
In high school, she was the desk clerk for three summers at a charming B&B and moved up to work at a waterfront Nantucket hotel. She discovered she had a talent for that. Her mind was sharp and quick and she could manage several different problems at once. She liked people and gradually realized that people liked her. She made a new plan. This spring she would have her master’s degree in hospitality. For the past four years, she’d worked part-time for the Golden Resort in Boston and she’d done well. She was ready to start her career. She was smart. She was experienced. She was prepared.
She knew she would always be sad because she couldn’t live her life on her beloved island, but she pushed that disappointment away. She’d come back whenever she could, and that had to be enough.
Besides, right now she had another problem.
She was in love.
Standing by the door to the apartment she shared with Rose Wells, Lydia lingered, double-checking her tote bag for the zillionth time.
Rose was packing for a weekend at home in Maine. Because she held a shirt between her chest and her neck as she folded it with both hands, her words were mumbled.
“Why are you so anxious? This isn’t like you at all.”
“Well, I don’t know,” Lydia answered grumpily. “I guess it’s just that I’m nervous about inviting Jari home for Stroll. I know I should be happy that he wants to come, but I’m terrified he’ll meet my family and take the first plane back to Boston.”
“You’ve been with the guy for almost a year. You said he seems serious.”
“Jari always seems serious.”
Lydia went into the bathroom, shut the door, and sat on the rim of the bathtub, elbows on her knees, chin in her hands. She needed to think.
We hope you are enjoying the book so far. To continue reading...
Please log in to recommend or discuss...
