Читать книгу Christmas in Hawthorn Bay - Kathleen O'Brien - Страница 3

Dear Reader,

I love Christmas so much it’s become a joke in my family. When I was six, my uncle came to our house and asked my dad incredulously, “Is Kathleen really out on the porch playing Christmas music?” It was July.

Maybe I began loving the season because my parents filled our living room with marvelous presents—life-size dolls, dollhouses with real electric lights and stuffed turtles and crocodiles the size of armchairs. But I still love it, even though I have to do the shopping myself, and the cooking, and the cleaning…and the dreaded opening of the bills in January.

Christmas has everything. It has lilting, emotional music—can anyone listen to Bing Crosby sing “O Holy Night” without tearing up? It has color—what’s more visually joyous than a whole neighborhood twinkling with lights? It has great food—when else can you stuff yourself, from the morning’s pumpkin muffins to the late-night reheated pecan pie, without feeling guilty? It has family, friends and time off from work. It has cherished rituals that wind like golden threads through our lives, connecting great-grandparents to the generations they’ll never see.

And it has that most beautiful of all things: Hope. At Christmas we believe in fresh starts, in second chances. In the promise of angels and the return of innocence. Christmas seemed like the perfect season for Nora Carson and Jack Killian to find each other again, after twelve long years apart. They have many problems to overcome—betrayals, broken hearts and terrible secrets. But the magic of Christmas, surely, is enough to overcome all that. I hope you enjoy their story.

And remember…there really is no law that says you can’t play carols in July!

Warmly,

Kathleen