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Overview
In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.
Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:
Dear Friends,
Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more interesting than the story of our lives? Often, it is the story of an entire family. But you also have to read between the lines with Christmas letters. Sometimes, what is not said is even more important than what is on the page.
In The Christmas Letters, I have used this familiar format to illumine the lives, hopes, dreams, and disappointments of three generations of American women. Much of the story of The Christmas Letters is also told through shared recipes. As Mary, my favorite character, says, "I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crepes phase, and now it's these salsa years."
I wrote this little book for the same reason I write to my friends and relatives every holiday—Christmas letters give us a chance to remember and celebrate who we are.
With warmest greetings, Lee Smith
Synopsis
In The Christmas Letters, three generations of women reveal their stories of love and marriage in the letters they write to family and friends during the holidays. It's a down-home Christmas story about tradition, family, and the shared experiences of women.
Here, in a letter of her own, Lee Smith explains how she was inspired to write this celebrated epistolary novel:
Dear Friends,
Like me, you probably get Christmas letters every year. I read every word and save every letter. Because every Christmas letter is the story of a life, and what story can be more interesting than the story of our lives? Often, it is the story of an entire family. But you also have to read between the lines with Christmas letters. Sometimes, what is not said is even more important than what is on the page.
In The Christmas Letters, I have used this familiar format to illumine the lives, hopes, dreams, and disappointments of three generations of American women. Much of the story of The Christmas Letters is also told through shared recipes. As Mary, my favorite character, says, "I feel as if I have written out my life story in recipes! The Cool Whip and mushroom soup years, the hibachi and fondue period, then the quiche and crepes phase, and now it's these salsa years."
I wrote this little book for the same reason I write to my friends and relatives every holiday--Christmas letters give us a chance to remember and celebrate who we are.
With warmest greetings, Lee Smith
Publishers Weekly
It's easier to believe in Santa Claus than in the premise of Smith's holiday novella. Employing the epistolary form that she used much more successfully in Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith provides a series of letters among three generations of women, aiming to create a record of a family's joys and tragedies, as well as a slice of social history from 1944 to 1996. Unfortunately, credibility is a casualty of the device, as we are asked to believe that close relatives living in neighboring Southern states would let a year go by without even the most basic communication about births, deaths and marriages. The letters recapitulate episodes that family members would surely have heard about before (one correspondent reminds her parents at great length about how she met her husband). In the era of telephones and cameras, it is highly unlikely that the informationboth intimate and picayunecontained in these detailed missives would have awaited a seasonal newsletter. Recipes passed down through the decades, beginning with boiled custard and ending with an African dish from a woman in the Peace Corps, are meant to indicate changing social mores. But nothing here can surmount the awkward format of a book that is, in fact, as bland as boiled custard. Author tour. (Oct.)
Editorials
Publishers Weekly -
It's easier to believe in Santa Claus than in the premise of Smith's holiday novella. Employing the epistolary form that she used much more successfully in Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith provides a series of letters among three generations of women, aiming to create a record of a family's joys and tragedies, as well as a slice of social history from 1944 to 1996. Unfortunately, credibility is a casualty of the device, as we are asked to believe that close relatives living in neighboring Southern states would let a year go by without even the most basic communication about births, deaths and marriages. The letters recapitulate episodes that family members would surely have heard about before (one correspondent reminds her parents at great length about how she met her husband). In the era of telephones and cameras, it is highly unlikely that the informationboth intimate and picayunecontained in these detailed missives would have awaited a seasonal newsletter. Recipes passed down through the decades, beginning with boiled custard and ending with an African dish from a woman in the Peace Corps, are meant to indicate changing social mores. But nothing here can surmount the awkward format of a book that is, in fact, as bland as boiled custard. Author tour. (Oct.)Library Journal
One of our most accomplished authors scores again. As in Fair and Tender Ladies (LJ 9/15/88), Smith writes an epistolary, here in the form of Christmas greetings sent from North Carolina by female members of the Pickett family. In what they sayand don't saythese articulate, down-to-earth women preserve three generations of American experience. Birdie, a feisty World War II bride, records the challenges of leaving the farm to open a successful small business while raising a houseful of children. Birdie's oldest daughter, Mary, continues the story in the mid-Sixties, after dropping out of college to wed. She tracks 25 years of moves, from trailer to luxury home, from unexplained domesticity to problematic independence. Next, granddaughter Melanie picks up the tradition, hinting that the family writing talent will turn professional. The Picketts's joys, tragedies, recipes, and reflections make an affecting narrative that ends much too soon. Highly recommended.Starr E. Smith, Marymount Univ. Lib., Arlington, Va.Kirkus Reviews
With her typical easy wit and down-home charm, Smith (Saving Grace, 1995, etc.) fashions an epistolary novella from that most infamous of genres, the annual family letter that often arrives in Christmas cards.The three generations of Christmas letters in Smith's genial narrative span 50 years, and evolve as dramatically as their means of reproduction, from crude carbon copies to mimeograph to Xeroxes—from the personal to the word-processed. Each letter records the significant events of the year before, beginning in 1944, when Birdie Pickett writes home to West Virginia about her marriage, her first child, and the loneliness she feels in North Carolina, where she lives with her in-laws while her new husband serves in the South Pacific. Later letters chronicle his return home, his effort to run the family farm, the destruction of the farm in a flood, and the opening of a dime store in town. Birdie's terse epistles always end with a recipe, such as "Mrs. Goodwillie's Bible Cake," with its ingredients taken from Scripture. In 1967, Birdie's daughter Mary resumes the family narrative and documents her own transition from trailer-park bride to suburban matron, with four kids, a fancy house, and membership in the local country club. All of this falls apart, and in 1993, Mary writes the first "real" Christmas letter, one that doesn't hide the truth; her narrative includes her feelings about (among other things) her recent messy divorce, her brother's tragic return from Vietnam, her husband's history of infidelity, and her oldest son's homosexuality. A single letter from Mary's daughter Melanie (in the present) includes her own efforts to research family history, which is what the past has now become—fodder for her planned novel.
A clever idea that finds its own suitable length: Smith's short novel leaves so much unsaid, as befits the semi-public epistolary genre, but manages to reflect change in humble matters, even in something so simple as a recipe. A delight.