Skipping Christmas: a novel

Insight on the News, Dec 31, 2001 by Rex Roberts

Busy elves that they are, authors and publishers produce a surprising array of Christmas books every year. This season, we are treated to heartwarming humor and wisdom in Chicken Soup for the Soul: A Christmas Treasury (Health Communications, $19.95, 282 pp) by Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen; heartwarming decoration tips in Christopher Radko's Heart of Christmas (Clarkson Potter, $35, 192 pp); and heartwarming suspense in He Sees You When You're Sleeping (Simon & Schuster, $20,202 pp) by Mary Higgins Clark and Carol Higgins Clark.

The big seller topping the charts: Skipping Christmas (Doubleday, $19.95, 177 pp) by John Grisham. More of a fable than a work of fiction, the story concerns the Kranks, whose 23-year-old daughter, Blair, has left for Peru to work as a Peace Corps volunteer. Alone in their subdivision home in an anonymous city in America -- it's cold enough for slush and snow -- the Kranks aren't in a mood to celebrate Christmas. When Luther Krank, an accountant, spends a sleepless night adding up bills from last year's holiday, he devises a bold plan. He and his wife, Nora, will skip Christmas -- no gifts, no parties, no cards, no charities -- and instead spend the money on a 10-day cruise to the Caribbean.

You see where this is going ... the Kranks soon earn the enmity of their friends and neighbors as they decline their annual blue spruce from the Boy Scouts, forgo office festivities and refuse to decorate their house with blinking lights and a rooftop Frosty -- an act of defiance with huge consequences, since every resident is expected to contribute to the block's effort to win the Festive Lighting contest.

Grisham's work -- his blockbuster novels include The Firm, The Pelican Brief and The Client -- is better watched than read. Indeed, Skipping Christmas reads like a treatment for a TV movie. The elements of the plot fit together nicely, and his characters pass through the obligatory stages of conflict leading to a surprise climax. It works, except that the Kranks and kindred are caricatures, just another batch of harried Americans engaged in commercialized rituals offering no spiritual sustenance. The story is meant to nurture the soul but, like the fruitcakes so dreaded by Kranks, it is artificially sweet and full of pits.

In the memoir category: Christmas in Plains (Simon & Schuster, $20, 157 pp) by Jimmy Carter. The 39th president of the United States, who since leaving the White House has become a poet and humanitarian, recalls his childhood in Georgia, his 11 years in the Navy and, of course, his career as a politician, the common theme being his annual pilgrimage to his (and his wife, Rosalynn's) home in Plains, Ga. It's a well-meaning exercise, and Carter's empathetic portraits of his black neighbors, his evocation of the simple life and his quiet faith seem genuine.

"One gift from Santa Claus that was almost inevitable for a farm boy like me was a Daisy air rifle," writes Carter, who throughout the short book waxes nostalgic for times when common sense and fellow feeling, not politically correct ideologies, dictated behavior. "This was the first step toward manhood: to master the necessary skills and safety rules of using firearms for hunting. I don't even remember when I received my first Red Rider model, but it seems that it was mine even before I was strong enough to cock the lever by myself. After Daddy was certain that I was thoroughly familiar with the weapon and knew the safety rules and basic courtesies expected among hunters, I was free -- even encouraged -- to use my gun when and where I chose."

There's poetry, too: Christmas Poems (Knopf Everyman's Library Pocket Poets, $12.50, 254 pp), selected and edited by John Hollander and J.D. McClatchy. The collection has been out for a couple of years, but no matter. Hollander and McClatchy, notable poets in their own right, have assembled a wonderful batch of songs and sonnets, from classics such as Clement Moore's "A Visit from St. Nicholas" to lesser known gems by unlikely authors such as Dorothy Parker, who wrote "The Maid-Servant at the Inn":

   "I never saw a sweeter child--
   The little one, the darling one!--
   I mind I told her, when he smiled
   You'd know he was his mother's son."

If Grisham's Christmas has been thoroughly secularized, Hollander and McClatchy note in their foreword that Christmas is both holiday and holy day, and the grandest poems in their anthology are those celebrating the Nativity. "Poets from Donne to Yeats to Eliot have brooded on the miraculous birth as an event that transformed both history and the human heart," they write. Jimmy Carter also emphasizes the sacred aspect of the season on first page of his book: "No matter what other personal desires or crises we have faced, I've never forgotten that this is the time to celebrate the birth of the Baby Jesus, and the impact of this event on the history of the world." At one time not so long ago it would have been ridiculous to make this point, but in a world of rooftop Frosties, it's more than welcome.