(courtesy NetGalley)
Life is full to the brim with traumatic moments.
Hardly a surprise there; while most of us head into life all wide-eyes, enthusiastic and bushy-tailed, believing no harm can befoul us and all we will have are sunshine and rainbows, we soon discover life, alas, has other ideas.
And when the scales of optimistic certainty are ripped from our eyes? What then?
Not many good things; not at first, at least.
But as the protagonist in Beth Moran’s beautiful taste of hope and life beyond the trauma, or more accurately, at least at first, in the depths of it, finds out, after the pain, beauty and love can re-emerge and change our lives completely all over again.
To be fair, you expect that sort of redemptive reassurance in festive romcoms, but there’s something about The Most Wonderful Time of the Year, that takes that expected element up a notch, offering up a story that genuinely feels like the very best of things can follow the very worst of them.
When we first meet Mary, she is giving birth alone in her remote cabin out in the woods, her sanctuary on the edge of a British town fast becoming a terrifying place to have a baby with her only option convincing a taxi driver, any taxi driver, to come and take her to a hospital before the inevitable comes to pass.
And while, yes, three weeks before my due date was probably close enough that I should have been starting to get ready, I’d had some other stuff going on. You know, minor distractions like mourning the loss of my career, home, friends who I’d considered more like family, and, most of all, the marriage that was supposed to make all my dreams come true, until everything tumbled into a nightmare.
After a terrible year when she has suffered profound loss of a magnitude greater than anything anyone of us should have to endure, Mary hopes that the arrival of her son will be a sign of far better things to come.
A promising beginning is the arrival of Beckett, a quiet mountain of a man who drives the taxi that gets her to, if not a hospital, then somewhere she can give birth where she will be safe, loved and cared for.
This unexpected moment of multiple arms being wrapped around her after many months all by herself is a gift, the start of a found family of people who remind that while you can lose everything, that doesn’t have to be forever.
And that is really one of the great joys of The Most Wonderful Time of the Year; it acknowledges how raw and great the pain can be when everything you once knew comes crashing down destructively around you, but doesn’t let the story there, reminding those of reading that the key to coming out of the other side of terrifying grief and loss is to rest in the arms of those more than willing to bear our weight.
It’s a tough thing to do in some ways – you’d think a hurting soul, one like Mary’s, would recognise and immediately embrace the salve of human kindness but the truth is, great trauma doesn’t vanish overnight and the beauty of Moran’s touchingly empathetic novel is that it knows that and lets that truth permeate and add emotional muscularity to its story of seasonal healing.
(courtesy official Beth Moran Facebook page)
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year has all the usual touches you’d expect of a novel set at Christmastime with peace, love, joy and goodwill to all people well and truly present and accounted for.
Christmas is magical and Moran lets that shine through, especially as Mary becomes more and more a part of a close-knit community of unexpected new friends, who become her family when she has none, and uses her talents to contribute to a major community festive event.
Being a part of this show means that she begins to spend time, all while tending to her newborn son and getting to know Beckett, who it will surprise you not at all, quickly becomes more than just a friend (though neither he nor Mary can bring themselves to admit that, as is the way of these romcoms for quite some time) with all kinds of new and wonderful people.
It goes against her instinctive desire to lock herself away and lick her wounds, but as The Most Wonderful Time of the Year it becomes abundantly and wonderfully clear that embracing and becoming part of community is the path to true and lasting healing.
Moran brings this community alive with dialogue which feels real and substantial, warm and funny, and which sounds believable and honest in a way not all festive romcoms manage, helped along by characters who are fully-formed, richly alive and who feel like people you would want surrounding you when times are beyond tough.
On Friday, I spent the morning finishing off a few final touches, washed my hair for the first time all week, took Bob [the baby] for a frosty walk in the forest and paced up and down the dining room, pausing to smooth a crease here, adjust a bow or a beak there, and waited for Beckett, my friend, hero and the man I’d pretty much fallen in love with, to take us to the dress rehearsal.
If ever there was a place to begin to love and hope again, it is the town in which Mary finds herself, a random choice in some ways, chosen on the run as Mary reacted instinctively to great loss.
You’re not really thinking at times like that, but thankfully, Mary somehow knew what she needed before she even knew she needed it and her instincts led her to people, especially Beckett, who don’t just make things a little bit better but re-invent her broken world in ways that elevate the soul and cheer the heart.
There is much truth and love in The Most Wonderful Time of the Year because it acknowledges how wild and damaged we can get when the very worst takes place and how much it takes to bring us back to a place where we can look out at life and not only see purpose and hope again, but feel embraced by a community of loving souls to do so.
A community by the way that also involves some people Mary left behind in her pain, old friends, family really, who are folded into her new reality in ways that feel fresh and real and who remind her that even the broken part of our lives can be made whole again.
The Most Wonderful Time of the Year is just a delightful, beautiful, charming and soul reassuring read, a story of Christmas redemption and healing that is emotionally honest, funny and abundantly hopeful and which knows that good things can happen at Christmas that can make the rest of the year feel like all your Christmases have come at once.