The Keeping Season

In almost every family, someone is quietly keeping something.

There are twenty-five stories in this book, one for every night until Christmas Day. Read them that way, one an evening from the first of December. Read them aloud after dinner. Or sit down with the whole book on a wet Sunday and finish it in an afternoon — it was written to survive all three.

Every story here is about a family, and each one is built around something true: in almost every family there is somebody doing a quiet, unglamorous, entirely unnoticed act of love. They have been doing it for years, and nobody has ever thought to ask them why. A grandmother who stands at the wrong end of a photograph. A brother who eats in the kitchen. A father who comes home every December with the worst Christmas tree in town.

"Everybody keeps something."

Volume One of a planned twelve — one book for every month, each taking a single relationship and giving it a whole winter. This one is about family. Somewhere around the fourth or fifth story, you may find yourself thinking about your own.

Twenty-five nights, twenty-five families

Twenty-five original chapter plates, one per story — plus an author's note, a reflection on the twenty-five lines the book was built around, and a free twenty-sixth story waiting for you afterward.

There is a twenty-sixth story.

It isn't in this book. It's called The Seventeenth Fruitcake, about a family that has passed the same unopened fruitcake around the Christmas table for seventeen years — until someone finally cuts into it. It's yours, free, in the Krishnaboon library.