This is a book of short stories about Christmas. But they are not Christmas stories. Rather, this is a book of stories about families....families brought together, as it happens, by the season of Christmas...but the eternal human truths here are, no doubt, just as valid for Greek Easter, End OF Ramadan, ...and American Thanksgiving. Anytime and place, in fact, where the family assembles for Mother's cooking! Each story views the family get together from a different perspective. In the first tale `Travelling Hopefully',Irish Meg, the absent mother, is off across the world to spend Christmas with the son she has not seen for so long and the Greek Daughter-in-law she has never met:

" They were full of envy at the office when Meg told them she was going to Australia for a month on December 11th. 'The weather,' they said, 'the weather.' She would miss the cold, wet weeks in London when the streets were so crowded the traffic was at a standstill, when people were fussed and it was all so commercialised. 'Lucky Meg,' they said, and even the younger ones, the girls in their twenties, seemed genuinely jealous of her. This made Meg smile to herself. Even though she was fifty-three, which didn't feel terribly old, she knew that most of the people she worked with thought she was well over the hill. They knew she had a grown-up son in Australia but because they knew he was married they weren't interested in him. That, and because he didn't come back home to visit his Mum. Married or single they would have been interested had they only seen her handsome Robert. Robert who had been captain of his school, who had got so many ALevels. Robert, aged twenty-five and married to a girl called Rosa, a Greek girl who Meg had never met. Robert wrote and said the wedding would be quiet, but it didn't look very quiet, Meg thought, when she got the Photographs. There seemed to be dozens and dozens of Greek relatives and friends. Only the groom's family was missing. She tried hard to keepher voice light when she asked him about this on the telephone. He had been impatient as she had known he would be. "Don't Fuss, Mum," he had said, as he had said since he was five years old and appeared with blood-soaked bandages around his knees. "Rosa's people were all here, you and Dad would have had to come thousands of miles. It's not important. You'll come some day when we all have more time to talk.' And, of course, he had been right. A wedding where most of the cast spoke Greek, where she would have to meet Gerald, her ex-husband, and probably his pert, little wife, and make conversation with them... it would have been intolerable. Robert had been right. And now she was off to see them, to meet Rosa, the small, dark girl in the photographs. She was going to spend a month in the sunshine, see places that she had only seen in magazine articles or on television. They would have a big party to welcome her once she had got over the jet lag. They must think she was very frail Meg thought; they were giving her four days to recover. Robert had written excitedly, they would take Meg to the Outback, show her the real Australia. She would not be just a tourist seeing a few sights, she would get to know the place. Secretly she wished he had said that she could sit all day in the little garden and use the neighbour's swimming pool. Meg had never known a holiday like that. For so many years there had been no holiday at all, as she saved and saved to get Robert the clothes, the bikes and the extras that she hoped would make up for the fact that he was missing a father....."

The second story, `A Typical Irish Christmas' is probably my favourite in a hard- to- separate collection. Here we see Christmas through the sad eyes of the recently bereaved widower:

" Everyone in the office wanted to ask Ben for Christmas. He was exhausted trying to tell them that, honestly, he was fine. He didn't look fine,he didn't sound fine. He was a big, sad man who had lost the love of his life last springtime. How could he be fine? Everything reminded him of Helen. People running to meet others in restaurants, people carrying flowers, people spending a night at home, a night away. Christmas would be terrible for Ben so they all found an excuse to invite him. For Thanksgiving he had gone to Harry and Jeannie and their children. They would never know how long the hours had seemed, how dry the turkey, how flavourless the pumpkin pie, compared to the way it had been with Helen. He had smiled and thanked them and tried to take part but his heart had been like lead. He had promised Helen he would try to be sociable after she was gone, that he would not become a recluse working all the hours of the day and many of the night. He had not kept his promise. But Helen had not known it would be so hard. She would not have known the knives of loss he felt all over him as he sat at a Thanksgiving table with Harry and Jeannie and remembered that last year, his Helen had been alive and well with no shadow of the illness that had taken her away. Ben really and truly could not go to anyone for Christmas. That had always been their special time, the time they trimmed the tree for hours and hours,laughing and hugging each other all the while. Helen would tell him stories about the great trees in the forests of her native Sweden; he told her stories about trees they had bought in stores in Brooklyn, late on Christmas Eve when all the likely customers had gone and the trees were half price. They had no children but people said this is what made them love each other all the more. There was nobody to share their love but nobody to distract them either. Helen worked as hard as he did but she seemed to have time to make cakes and puddings and to soak the smoked fish in a special marinade. 'I want to make sure you never leave me for another woman . . . she had said. 'Who else could give you so many different dishes at Christmas?' He would never have left her and he could not believe that she had left him that bright spring day. Christmas with anyone else in New York would be unbearable. But they were all so kind, he couldn't tell them how much he would hate their hospitality. He would have to pretend that he was going elsewhere. But where?........"

We see Christmas through the eyes of several widows, too, and we share the anxiety of that first Christmas the new stepmother must organize. We sit in for Christmas in the homes of families of varying degrees of disfunction, and in the lonely homes of the Mistresses whose husbands will never leave their wives...especially at this time of the year! We meet put-upon wives working hard in their kitchens at Christmas, and we meet well-meaning adult children trying to relieve other mothers of some of the seasonal responsibility. We can experience the difficulties faced by the newly extended family after divorce and remarriage....and in the last, delightful story, `The Hard Core', we find out what happens to the few folk left in the Old Folks' Home at christmas...the ones so nasty or catankerous that noone wants to take them home to be part of a family.

Of her own book, Maeve Binchely has this to say:

These short stories are set in different places and at different times. It's the first time I have ever written any stories set in Australia and just thinking about the place made me wish I was back there. The stories set in Ireland and England have appeared in various publications in these islands but will, I believe, be new to Australian and New Zealand readers. I hope that you will enjoy them; and in a different and much less attractive climate I will think of people reading them in a sunnier hemisphere, and will feel proud to be published in a land I love so much that is so far away Maeve Binchy, Dalkey, Co Dublin, Ireland 1995

I read these stories the week of my mother's death, a week when I'd wondered aloud how we could bear to celebrate Christmas this year, after so many family changes.Nor is it warm and sunny here in Australia, just now....cold, you might say, as the grave. But these stories were comforting, somehow, for in the universality of human experience, there is a certain solace. And there is the certainty that the summer WILL return, that the family WILL survive, and that the decorations in the top of Mum's wardrobes can be brought to this house and used again and again. As it should be!. And thankyou, Maeve, for reminding me!

Look At Last Week's Review Look at Other Reviews Back To Robin's Golden Oldies Back To The Table Of Contents

Reactions, Comments and suggestions to: robink@mail.austasia.net

Copyright © Robin Knight, 1998.