An Almost Perfect Christmas

October 15, 2018
English humorist, novelist (Paradise Lodge?, 2016), and author of the delightful epistolary memoir, Love, Nina? (2012), Stibbe has a few words for people who love and hate Christmas in this little collection. Essays cover, for instance, Stibbe's practical gift-giving advice ("If?like me?you have a huge, materialistic family and/or a circle of fairly shallow friends, it's probable that you find Christmas shopping slightly overwhelming as well as expensive, time-consuming, financially ruinous, worrying and stressful"); the rules of Christmas-letter writing of yore ("People didn't feel the need to write the actual facts"); or the Christmas party burned into memory as a not-so-silent night, owing to a simple playlist miscalculation. In the handful of short stories scattered among the essays, an eager student gravely misjudges an over-the-holidays, extra-credit assignment, and a family gets a little too close to their Christmas turkey. Stibbe concludes with a Christmas glossary, rife with references from the preceding pieces and hilarious cross-references to itself. Funny, smart, sweet, and tender, this is greater than a gift book and readable any time of year.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2018, American Library Association.)