(courtesy Penguin Books)
When you love dearly dies, suddenly everything about them becomes vitally and inviolably important.
That hit home very hard to me in the wake of the passing of my dad (2016) and then my mum (2019); suddenly I need to watch National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation every year, which my dad loved, and keep cuttings from my mum’s curry plant alive.
To everyone else they might like trivial observances but to me, they mean the world, keeping alive the memory, in small but meaningful ways, of two people who meant the world to me.
That dynamic, that need to honour those people that have passed, is imbued in every page of Keeping a Christmas Promise by Jo Thomas, which sees three friends head to Iceland from busy lives in the UK to honour the memory of their friend Laura, lost to cancer at the all-too-young age of 38.
One of the chief items on her bucket list was seeing the Northern Lights in Iceland, and so, on what would have been her 40th birthday, with Christmas just around the corner, Michelin chef Freya, retirement home administrator Meg and wealthy Joanna head north to honour the memory of a much-loved and greatly missed friend.
It’s going to be a hard trip, they all know that, but making sure Laura gets her final wish, even in death, matters more than anything and nothing is going to stop the three friends of twenty five years standing from ensuring Laura’s dream of seeing the Northern Lights at Christmas is honoured.
But, I tell myself, I’m [Freya] only here until the road is reopened. Just a day more probably. It’s better not to think about Pétur in that way at all. He’s an attractive man, but I’m not here for a one-night stand. I’m here because at the moment we’re stuck and will leave as soon as can.I clear my throat, hoping it will clear my head too, and set to work proportioning the bread and revelling in its gloriously warm smell, which I will never forget and will always remind me of his touch in the snow.
What they discover is that there is such a thing as being to committed to a cause.
In pursuit of the evasive lights which don’t seem to want to appear on cue – the three friends could only spare three days for the trip and so they are last wish fulfilling to a fairly tight timetable – they take some risks they shouldn’t have and end up being trapped in a remote part of rural Iceland when an avalanche buries their car and that of another traveller Frankie and blocks the only road into and out of the village.
It’s a disaster, or at least that’s what they all feel at the time, but as Keeping a Christmas Promise picks up speed, and they are rescued by handsome local farmer and community stalwart Pétur, it becomes apparent that maybe all the things they thought were important about their lives aren’t really the big deals they once thought them to be.
It’s a familiar trope in Christmas romcoms, which are all about reinvention, healing and renewed hope, and Thomas goes hard on the idea that being taken out of the usual everyday pace and unthinking frenzy of our lives, while frightening at first, especially when you’re really far from home, can actually be the best thing that ever happened to you.
Neither Freya, Joanna or Meg think that at first, but as the story builds and builds and three friends become part of community efforts to feed stranded people in the surrounding area, they come to appreciate that maybe they need to approach in ways that differ markedly from where they are right now.
Freya is the main game in town as far as thinking about life in a whole new way is concerned.
As a chef she is central to the Pétur-led efforts to feed people who would otherwise starve such as the women in a local refuge and Knútur, an old hermit who is lovingly looked after by the village who know how much pain he has gone through in life, and it’s no surprise that feelings soon begin to develop between Freya and her farmer knight-in-shining-armour who is turns out is a talented jeweller with a heart of gold.
If you think that Keeping a Christmas Promise is sticking fairly close to the tropes and cliches of the genre, you would be absolutely right, and while Thomas doesn’t always stick the landing, with romantically or in the friendship dynamics – the dialogue can be clunky at times and the narrative repetitive and obvious – she does deliver on the idea that being stuck in a place you don’t want to be can do wonders for looking at life in a whole new way.
In that regard, Keeping a Christmas Promise excels, delivering on the idea that life doesn’t just have one course to take and that when a friend like Laura urges to go and live life, she may not be meaning that you stick to the exact same course you’re on.
Perhaps something else lies in wait for you?
We may not be where any of us is supposed to be right now, but it could be where we need to be. The kitchen, in the golden candlelight, filled with proper snowflakes Meg and Frankie have been cutting out while I was cooking, and with the smell of warm better, laughter, stories about the Yule Lads and trolls, feels warm, welcoming and very much like home.
You don’t have to be a genius to know that that is what precisely what happens to Freya, and to Joanna, Meg and their new friend Frankie to a lesser extent, but even though you can see the finish line coming from a mile away, there’s something quite lovely about the way Keeping a Christmas Promise gets there.
Thomas, who says in her Acknowledgements, that she has long loved Iceland and its people and food, does a beautiful job of evoking the sense of community in the remote Icelandic village that all the women temporarily call home and underscoring why it’s not just a lovely idea for people like Pétur and his friends, but often a matter of life and death.
The novel also makes it clear that sometimes honouring your loved one may mean thinking outside the box, and that even though they seem far away and lost to you, except in memories and acts of honouring their final wishes, that they can actually be far closer and more present than you think.
If you still lost in grief or desperately missing that special someone then Keeping a Christmas Promise may be just the festive read you need, a love letter to friendship, to following your heart, to remembering those you love and to celebrating Christmas in ways that may not what you planned or thought you valued but which may transform you and everything you love and turn a homage to the past into a beautiful launching into a brand-new future.