The Christmas Basket

Oh my!!! I almost forgot about this little treasure I read yesterday!!! Apparently Debbie come out with a Christmas book every year and I happened upon one of them at the library before I had surgery. I had checked it out but for some reason it got left at the bottom of the pile and since I had finished all the others I had no choice but to start it yesterday morning. I guess I was trying to avoid getting to Christmasy since it's still a ways off, but this book was well worth it.

Reading it reminded me of a movie (I think it was on Lifetime) with two families that had grown up on Catalina Island and the kids had moved away and over time the mothers had gotten into a fight and were always trying to one up each other, well the kids fall in love but then have to deal with their mothers who can't seem to get along not matter what....and it turns out the fathers have stayed friends all along!!

Anyways...this book was a gem really. The mothers have been fighting for years over a stolen antique tea set and things just escalated from there...the two kids had been high school sweethearts and were planning on eloping one night but each thought they had been stood up, turns out the note has been slightly tampered with thanks to a spilled can of soda and for 10 years they went on and lived their lives, always thinking the other one had walked away. The daughter comes back for Christmas and while she hopes she doesn't run into Thom he ends up being on her commuter flight....and in the movie theater where she and her sister are throwing popcorn...and at the restaurant....eventually they figure out what happened, but have to work through their mothers hating each other.

The Mothers end up having to work together to make Christmas Baskets for the Salvation Army (Sarah, Noelle's mom has to do it for the service hours required to use the club for her daughter Kristen's wedding) and her and Mary just can't seem to work together...they even get thrown out of the local Value-X (which, if you read Buffalo Valley will sound awful familiar!!) while shopping for things on the list.

Anways, long story short, mothers make up while stuck in a ditch during an ice storm and the husbands find them drunk off some Scotch that one of the husbands had left in his Golf bag and they all make it home to have Noelle and Thom come in with some exciting news. Of course, Noelle and Thom have no idea the families have made up and when they see both sets of cars outside Noelle's home they panic but figure they can kill 2 birds with 1 stone and tell both families the news at the same time, only to walk in and discover that all their worry was for nothing.

A very cute story =)