(courtesy Harper Collins Publishers Australia)
If you read a few Christmas-themed books, you will be well acquainted with the recurrent themes of this most festive of genres.
At least one member of the couple at the centre of the story must be emotionally broken or traumatised and in need of some deep tissue redemption, and to do this, they head to their home town or a friend’s village nd there they find community, belonging, purpose and friendship.
It’s an intoxicating brew and it works because who of us doesn’t long for pain to be expunged and for wrongs to be righted, especially at Christmas where all those twinkling lights, tinseled trees and general bonhomie of the season makes it feel set apart from the grungy dregs of day-to-day life and full of hope and possibility?
But of course while the tropes are constant, exemplary execution is not, and you almost wish the person at the centre of an indifferently written festive fable (which are thankfully rare) would just pack up and go home and leave us to enjoy the season without them.
Thankfully, you won’t be doing that with Sue Moorcroft’s delightful novel, A White Christmas on Winter St., which granted has all the expected tropes and clichés in place but arranged in such a way that you are feeling as if you are taking them in for the first, wondrously soul-reviving time.
Outside, in her car in the chilly green car park, she [Sky] paused to think, anxiety creeping over her in a sliding, sinking sensation of having no schedule and no one to meet.
A White Christmas on Winter St. has at its initially troubled beating heart, Sky Terran, an environmentally conscious woman in her late thirties who has, after a traumatic childhood with an angry, alcoholic mother, found some peace and not inconsiderable success working in real estate with her foster brother Freddy.
She’s a workaholic with no close friends and only one foster family member, but she’s put the past behind her and is as happy as she think she’s going to get.
But then things goes quite terribly south, and Sky flees to the village of Middledip, a place she once found happiness with foster mother, Nan Heather, and which, with the purchase of the long-neglected Corner House, could become the home she’s looking for.
Sky has learnt to be wary of opening herself up to others but the quirky villagers won’t take no for an answer, and before she knows what’s hit her, Sky is decorating her house for the annual street decoration competition for Christmas, getting to know her neighbours and discovering that being part of a close knit, caring community can be one of the most wonderful things to happen to a person.
Soon, she can’t imagine life without next door neighbour, Marietta, who loves trivia comps at the pub (and preferably winning them), Courtney and her 11-year-old rambunctious sweetheart of a son, Wilf, and yes, handsome Daz, whose not long out of a break-up with the emotionally flammable ABi and who naturally is the one with which Sky finds herself sparking off.
(courtesy official Sue Moorcroft Facebook page)
Rather wonderfully though, while A White Christmas on Winter St. does spend a reasonable amount of time bringing Sky and Daz together then splitting them apart then, well, you know, in the final act, it also devotes just as much time to the way in which Sky finds herself remade and renewed by becoming part of a community.
It is, in effect, what drives the narrative of the novel, and while the virtues of community are a feature of many a festive novel, it’s front and centre in A White Christmas on Winter St. and in a fairly emotional hefty way.
Much is made of the fact that Sky is quite alone, and why it is she keeps an arm’s length from people, and why a simple though important house purchase, made almost on a whim, suddenly becomes the catalyst for a wholesale change to Sky’s previously lonely existence.
Moorcroft devotes a lot of time to bringing this community together in ways that feel grounded and real, whether its Marietta asking Sky to join her trivia team, or Wilf needing the kind of babysitting that Sky, temporarily between jobs can provide for Courtney who’s juggling a huge amount of emotional ramifications from recent shocking events.
Each step on the way to community feels like things that could actually happen to someone, and so while A White Christmas on Winter St. may have more than a hint of a fairytale to it, it also feels very honest about the fact that while can restore and redeem that doesn’t always happen to everyone and not in the way they’d like.
Tucking away her phone, she grabbed her coat and boots and made for the barn, ready to start on the back garden with a chainsaw. Freddy was her old life. Her new life was calling.
While you could well argue you don’t want much reality shoved into your Christmas escapist bliss, like too much stuffing in a turkey, Moorcroft magically makes it feels as if it belongs right alongside the more redemptive elements, and in fact, so well woven in after the more realistic elements, that the more heartwarming fairytale-ish parts feel elevated by their more emotionally honest narrative mates.
And that likely why A White Christmas on Winter St. is so appealing.
It has all the wondrously lovely escapism we want, with all the festive trimmings we crave, and that alone makes this a lot of rewarding fun to read; but it also positions this lovely antidote to the darkness and sadness of the world at large right in the heart of the very things it is healing people, principally Sky, from and thus, feels like an even better, more fulfilling story.
A White Christmas on Winter St. is a joy to read because its characters are happily fully-formed and lovely to be around, its story feel happily possible, and its setting feels like somewhere we’d all want to settle, but what most of all what warms you to it is the way it elevates community as something that’s not intrusive as many people who have trauma might think, but rather the very thing a tired, angry, alone soul needs to see life a different way, to find themselves coming alive again and to live the sort of connected, unconditionally loved life everyone wants to live whether they know it or not.