Trish's Reviews > Comfort & Joy

If you’d ever thought Christmas was a mad, mad time of the year, check out this laugh-out-loud funny story of a twice-divorced mother, Clara, who loves the Christmas spirit so much that she continues to host her two ex-husbands and her former mother-in-law every year along with her own extended family for a wild and merry day.

Christmas tradition is sacrosanct and our heroine (what else could we call her?) manages to make especial truffle treats for the vegetarians of the group while satisfying everyone else’s wish for family favorites. She spends more on the people she doesn’t like than the people she does like simply because she puts it off longer and doesn’t want to offend. She uses old Christmas decorations along with new, but makes each year a more beautiful and perfect version of the past.

If you are exhausted in the rush to make Christmas perfect, take a moment to savor the world created in this novel: the girlfriend secrets, the mother-daughter, mother-son, and sister-sister interactions are all priceless, to say nothing of having one’s ex-mother-in-law to one’s idea of a perfect holiday. All that can go wrong will go wrong, but for the stalwarts among us, Christmas is a state of mind.