I finished one Christmas novel and two novellas recently and thought I’d share them all at once.

In Tidings of Comfort and Joy by Davis Bunn, Marissa is a teen-aged girl whose family is about to go on a longed-for trip to Hawaii for Christmas. But then Marissa gets sick with an unknown illness, so sick she can hardly stand. When she stabilizes, the family decides to go on the trip and leave Marissa with her grandmother, Emily. Emily feels the family needs the respite. And I don’t think this was ever spelled out, but since the trip was only affordable through a special sale, the family would probably not be able to get refunds on the airfare.

Marissa, as you can imagine is heart-broken and blindingly angry. She says a lot of hateful things to everyone–when she can stay awake.

Emily helps care for Marissa and then begins to tell a unknown story from her own past. During WWII, Emily had met and fell in love with a pilot. After the war, she flew to England against her parents’ wishes to marry him. But after a harrowing trip, she arrives only to find that he has gone and left her a note, breaking their engagement. He has made arrangements for her to stay in his flat under the care of his landlady until she can get back home.

The only problem is, she can’t get home. All the means of transportation are taken up by the military trying to get soldiers home.

After grieving for a few days, Emily reluctantly gets involved with the community, specifically the orphanage full of children from different countries. The government wants to send the children to a camp for displaced persons, but Emily and the local vicar fight to keep that from happening. And then an outbreak of hepatitis sweeps the orphanage.

This is a sweet story of finding meaning and purpose in the midst of heartbreak.

Finding Christmas by Karen Schaler is not Christian fiction, but the reviews assured me it was clean, and it was.

Emmie is an over-the-top fan of Christmas. Her family always loved the holiday. But since her parents died, everything about Christmas helps Emmie feel close to them.

Her boyfriend, Grant, is a busy lawyer trying to make partner. Emmie runs the community center her parents started. Their schedules are so crazy, Emmie decides to take a special vacation to Christmas Point, a Christmas-themed town three hours from Seattle. She prepares a scavenger hunt that will lead Grant to the inn where they are staying. The clues start with a present Emmie left with the doorman at Grant’s condo.

But then the present gets delivered to the wrong guy, Sam. He’s a best-selling writer who has been stuck ever since his sister passed away. He thinks the present is from his agent, Candace, to help revive his Christmas spirit. Delighted, he follows the clues only to find, not Candace, but Emmie.

Emmie is devastated that her perfect plans went so awry. She loses all interest in the special dinner she had planned. But, since Grant can’t get away, the inn’s owner encourages Emmie and Sam not to let the dinner go to waste.

As Grant remains glued to his job, Sam is so delighted with the town, he decides to stay for a few days. At first he and Emmie keep running into each other as she participates in some of the activities she had planned to do with Grant. Emmie finds Sam loves Christmas as much as she does. And maybe he’s right about a more laid-back and less scheduled approach to life. And maybe he’s not the wrong guy after all . . .

This book took a thoroughly secular approach to Christmas. But it was a nice story with a Hallmark feel. In fact, the author has written a couple of successful Netflix and Hallmark films (which I have not seen).

Waiting for Christmas: A Story of Hope and the Best Gift of All by Lynn Austin involves characters from her earlier novel, All My Secrets. In that book, Addy was from a wealthy Gilded Age family, but when her grandfather died, the bulk of the estate went to a male heir. Addy had a trust fund left to her. Over the course of the novel, her grandmother convinces her that the excess the family had lived with for years was wasteful. It was better to live a useful live than an empty one of balls and society gossip. Addy married a young lawyer she fell in love with at the end of that book.

In this novella, Addy and Howard have been married about a month. Addy wants to be economical and learn to cook and keep house. Howard assures her that her gifts are better used in the suffrage movement she is active in as well as her charitable pursuits. He’s secretly afraid she will miss the high society life she came from.

Addy comes home one day to find a small, dirty boy, Jack, hiding in the bushes in front of her house. She coaxes him in. He had been looking for her mother, who had visited his orphanage earlier. He insists he is not an orphan. His father is on a ship which is due back at Christmas. When his mother died, their landlord called the authorities, who took him to an orphanage. But his three-year-old sister was hiding and never brought to the same orphanage.

Addy and Howard take the child in and try to help him find his sister as well as learn something about his father. Was his father on a ship, or had he abandoned the family? Did he truly have a sister, or was she imaginary?

Addy’s family’s foundation already supported a few orphanages. But as Addy visits others while looking for Jack’s sister, she’s appalled at their conditions. She’s equally upset to learn that many of the children are not true orphans, but have been left by mothers too poor to care for them. She insists that the suffrage movement was more than a fight for women’s right to vote, but a means of advocating for better conditions for women, better wages, and respectable opportunities to earn a living. But the need is so great.

This was another sweet story with several layers for a novella. Along with the search for Jack’s family and Addy and Howard’s adjustments to marriage and each other, it explores the truth that help doesn’t necessarily come from grand efforts at saving the day, but in small acts of kindness to those God places in our path.

All three of these were audiobooks, but I either had the Kindle version already, or found it for a couple of dollars. It’s nice when that happens. I love being able to go from reading to listening and back, depending on circumstances. The narrator for the first book was a little annoying, but not enough to set the audio aside. The other two were great.

These books all were a nice way to enhance my Christmas spirit and celebrations.