The Christmas Letters

by Lee Smith

Genres: Literary Fiction

Synopsis

Lee Smith is the New York Times best-selling author of The Last Girls and the recipient of a Lyndhurst Grant and a Reader's Digest Writer's Award. Library Journal calls her "one of our most accomplished authors." Here she delivers the heartwarming tale of three generations of women who record their lives in Christmas letters to the family.

Release date: August 19, 2002

Publisher: Algonquin Books

Print pages: 136

Sample

“Bless Lee Smith’s heart! Once again, the novelist from Chapel Hill, N.C., has proved that nobody knows Southern women better. Once again, her prose is apparently effortless. . . . Once again, she has crafted a sparkling little gem of a story brimming with wit, charm, heartbreak, and even, this time, recipes.” —Chicago Tribune

“One of our most accomplished authors scores again. . . . joys, tragedies, recipes, and reflections make an affecting narrative that ends much too soon. Highly recommended.” —Library Journal

“All the gladness and sadness of life are found in this compact volume. . . . [The Christmas Letters] reminds us how often the ties that bind can stretch to the breaking point and that there’s no better time than Christmas to mend the fraying seams.” —Southern Living

“A poignant story of public and private courage, ordinary hardship, and fragile hope; but mostly, it is a story of love.” —Country Living

“You will devour this collection.” —Booklist

“A perfect heart warmer for chilly winter days and a fun stocking stuffer.” —Woman’s Day

“With her typical easy wit and down-home charm, Smith fashions an epistolary novella from that most infamous of genres, the annual family letter that often arrives in Christmas cards. . . . A delight.” —Kirkus Reviews

“If there’s a better Southern writer writing now than Lee Smith, I don’t know who it is.” —The Southern Pines (North Carolina) Pilot

“Miss Smith, one of the South’s treasured voices, writes plainly and touchingly of the familial triumphs, discord, heartaches, and joys that accrue to become our lives.” —The Washington Times

“Getting to know [Smith’s] characters, laughing with them and sharing their sorrows is a rich and satisfying experience to be savored. . . . a strong oral tradition shines through her work.” —The Charleston (West Virginia) Sunday Gazette-Mail

“In Smith’s hands [the epistolary novel] becomes a supple instrument for revealing character and inner contradictions.” —Newsday

“[Smith’s] books bring laughter, tears, and joy, and always satisfy.” —Richmond Times-Dispatch

“Chock-full of homespun locutions and details . . . [The Christmas Letters] exudes genuine charm.” —The Raleigh (North Carolina) News & Observer

“The Christmas Letters is a sweetheart of a little book.” —The Columbia (South Carolina) State

“A story of personal triumph and learning to recognize what really matters.” —Nashville Life

“[The Christmas Letters] should stand out for its ability to find tiny, rare gems in the midst of ordinary life.” —The Dallas Morning News

“If everyone wrote letters as rich and revealing as Lee Smith’s characters do in The Christmas Letters, the holiday missives that stuff people’s mailboxes would be prized works of art. . . . It’s a tribute to women, and their ability to endure.” —The Salisbury Post

“Lee Smith has given her many fans a present in this delightful novella. . . . Smith’s genius shines through.” —Winston-Salem Journal





Dec. 24, 1944

Dear Mama and Rachel,

It is the day before Christmas and though I know I should be so happy with my own sweet angel baby Mary who lies right here beside me as I write this letter, I will tell you the truth. I am weepy, and cannot hold back my tears. Why do you reckon this is so, when Mary and me have everything we need here?

Why, we have got a room of our very own nestled up under the eaves of Bill’s parents’ house, it is a nice little room too, with a low roof that slopes up to a point at the top and the prettiest wallpaper featuring a trellis design covered all over in the most beautiful morning glories you can possibly imagine. They are a deep purply blue, and the trellis is white, it is lovely beyond belief. You know I have always been partial to morning glories. Also in this room there is a big iron bed painted white, a rocking chair, a night table with a funny green lamp that has a yellow lampshade with ball fringe all around it, and a little homemade desk where I now sit to write you this letter. There is also a washstand with a Blue Willow pitcher and bowl and an old black-painted trunk where I can lay my Mary down when I change her diapers. She has a little bassinet as well, very old, it has been in Bill’s family for years and years though nobody knows where it came from.

So Mary and I are well equipped, and should not want for a thing in the new year of our Lord 1945, not a thing in the world except to come back to West Virginia, which we cannot do.

It is so different here, all flat brown fields which stretch out from this farmhouse in three directions as far as the eye can see. But in the fourth direction, South—now this is the view from our little round window—there is the wide dark Neuse River moving slowly and mysteriously toward the Ocean which I have not yet seen and can scarcely imagine though Bill has promised to take us when he comes home. And way across the river, there’s the town. I can see it better at night when its lights make a pretty reflection in the water, like jewels. In fact the name of the movie theater in town is the Bijou which means jewel if I am correct. It is the colored lights of the Bijou which twinkle in the water come dark, how I love to look at them.

Still I wish I could have come back up home to have my baby, and stayed with you all until Bill gets out of the War, but he would not hear a word about it, not a word, saying that “No,” his own parents would take good care of his wife and baby. Well, it is the other way around, if you ask me, since Bill’s mother is sick so much. Mrs. Pickett is a woman who was beautiful once upon a time, I know it is true for I have seen the pictures. I need to remember that she got spoiled because she was the only child of wealthy parents, and had her way in everything, that this was her parents’ house and farm which Bill’s father is fast running into the ground, according to all. Come to mention it, I’m finding out that Mr. Slone Pickett has got a reputation around here as a lifelong ne’er-do-well, and a gambler and drunkard besides.

I must say that Bill did not breathe a word of all this to me, and in fact I wonder if he even knows the extent of his father’s Reputation. But it may have been that Mr. Pickett minded his P’s and Q’s better when Dennis and Bill were here working with him, and has only hit this new low since their departure for the War.

I hasten to add that Mr. Pickett does not bother me in any way, in fact he is charming to a fault, and seems devoted to little Mary. He likes to bounce her on his knee and sing aloud, “This is the way the Lady rides,” etc. But he is seldom here, always gone off “seeing to business,” as he puts it, which means sitting around with the other old fellows at Bryce’s Tavern across the river, playing cards and talking, or out in his car visiting people. Mr. Pickett loves to go visiting, and I must say I cannot blame him too much, as Mrs. Pickett is not very good company. But this leaves it all up to me, for Mrs. Pickett is quite demanding and it takes both me and old Lorene working double-time just to pacify her.

Mostly she lies in bed reading magazines and romance novels, with her teeth took out and laid on the bedside table. First she wants one thing then another. She eats about 8 little meals every day instead of 3 like normal people, because of an ulcer, she says, and everything has to be just so. For instance you have to cut all the crusts off the bread or she will not eat it.

I don’t think I’ve ever described Bill’s parents to you. In appearance Mrs. P. is tall and thin with arms and legs like pipe cleaners, an unusually large head, big blue eyes, and skin so white it looks like milkglass. By contrast, Mr. Pickett is still a handsome man, with thick white hair and eyebrows, though his belly hangs over his belt making him look a little like Humpty Dumpty. He dresses up every day fit to kill, he is quite the dandy. He would die if he knew he looks like Humpty Dumpty.

I must say . . .