We kick off this year’s Holiday Author Blog series with Amanda Peters, whose nationally bestselling debut novel, THE BERRY PICKERS, is now available in paperback. This Bookreporter.com Bets On pick won the 2024 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction and the 2023 Barnes & Noble Discover Prize. Her first collection of short stories, WAITING FOR THE LONG NIGHT MOON, releases on February 11th. Amanda’s grandfather passed away when she was just a teenager. One Christmas, her grandmother gifted her one of many books that he would read aloud to his family. Amanda has long cherished that book for a very special reason.
Just before Christmas, my grandfather died when I was 15. My grandmother spent that first Christmas without her husband alone, a choice she made to allow herself to grieve.
After that Christmas alone, it was myself, my mom and my two sisters who spent each Christmas with my grandmother. But before we were invited to join her, the entire family came together on Boxing Day as we always did --- six children and 19 grandchildren. The year prior to his death, my grandfather had arranged for a sleigh ride on Boxing Day. It snowed, and we were wet and cold. We were half-dressed in the clothes of my grandmother and half in the clothes of my grandfather, as our own clothes were making a racket in the dryer. We were hungry, so we settled into taco soup, baked beans, crackers with Cheese Whiz, apple pie and chocolate chip cookies.
Three hundred and sixty-three days later, my grandfather’s books were still on the shelf. They covered politics, religion, and great men of business and history, with the occasional children’s book shoved between them. We read them to the younger ones like he read them to us, the older ones. My grandmother gifted me one of those books many years later. I still have THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD with his notes in the margins and a letter from his second son, now also gone, when he gifted it to him.
We had turkey dinner on the 24th (as our family always does), followed by church. The lights darkened near the end of the service, and each person held a candle, as so many mismatched voices were happy in song. The next morning, after the presents were open and my grandmother was in the kitchen singing along to the festive tunes emanating from the little silver radio that always sat on the counter and the smell of bacon floated into the living room, my mother, my two sisters and I sat quiet --- so quiet --- reading the books we’d gotten for Christmas, still surrounded by my grandfather’s books.
This is a favourite memory of mine and maybe the reason I buy books for Christmas --- so that the people I love can be surrounded by books and sit in the quiet, with the lights of the Christmas tree offering a calm place to lose themselves in a story. And at Christmas, I pick out THE HISTORY OF THE WORLD. While I don’t read it, I do read his notes in the margins.
