I was able to finish some Christmas reading the last couple of weeks, but didn’t have time to review them. Many of them were short, so I’ll bunch them all together here.

In The 20th Christmas by Andrea Rodgers, Arianna Tate faces a parent’s worst nightmare: her almost 2-year-old son is taken from her in a coffee shop just before Christmas.

Al the searching, detectives, and appeals come up with zero results. People remembered seeing a young woman in the coffee shop, but no one could remember much about her.

For the next 20 years, Andrea and her husband descend into the lowest depths of despair. They almost lose their marriage, but make determined efforts to make things work. They’re finally able to move on, though the pain never goes away.

Meanwhile. Lydia Feller’s estranged, drug-abusing sister shows up on her doorstep with a child. Lydia had heard her sister was pregnant a while back, but the timing doesn’t seem to match up with the age of this child. When her sister dies of an overdose, Lydia adopts her child to show him love and grant some stability to his life.

Twenty years later, the pathways of all involved meet.

I felt Arianna’s life before the kidnapping was almost too perfect. And there were a number of parenthetical statements in the writing I was surprised got past an editor.

But this was a good book overall.

In A Cliche Christmas by Nicole Deese, Georgia Cole left heartache and humiliation in her home town of Lenox, Orgeon to become a Hollywood screenwriter famous for heartwarming but cliched Christmas movies. Since she works with Christmas themes all year, in December she usually takes her grandmother on an exotic vacation to get away from traditional Christmases.

But this year, her grandmother ropes her into putting on a Christmas play in her hometown to benefit a little girl with cancer.

Georgia runs smack into her old crush, Weston, who happens to be the uncle of the girl in question. She thought he lived elsewhere. They clash at every encounter until they finally start listening to each other.

Though in many ways this was a sweet story, I didn’t like all the manipulation going on with Georgia’s grandmother and Weston. Weston seems kind and caring in many respects, but he’s also a little pushy, pinning Georgia to a car at one point until she answers him. I don’t think the writer intended to make him seem as controlling as he came across sometimes, but in real life, I would’ve had reservations about him.

I read this because I loved a couple of Nicole’s other novels and I liked the unusual premise. Though I didn’t like this as well, I loved where the story ultimately ended up.

My friend Melanie mentioned rereading Shepherds Abiding at Christmas. The book comes in the middle of Jan Karon’s Mitford series. When I wanted something warm and Christmasy to finish out the year, I decided to listen to this again. I was afraid it might pull me into wanting to reread all the Mitford books. That’s a bit of a temptation, but this can be easily read as a Christmas book alone.

For me, this book was a beloved reread, enhanced by listening to the excellent audiobook version read by John McDonough.

Various subplots are going on among Mitford’s residents, but the overarching story involves Father Tim trying to restore a mismatched Nativity set bought from local antiques dealer, Andrew Gregory. He wants to do it as a surprise for his wife, but keeping a secret is hard in Mitford.

This book showcases Karon’s trademark blend of warmth, humor and truth. The version I listened to also included short stories “Esther’s Gift” and “The Mitford Snowmen.”

The Christmas Doll by Elvira Woodruff reads like an old-fashioned nineteenth-century classic, but it was published in 2000.

Two young sisters, Lucy and Glory, are orphaned and spend several years in a London workhouse with barely enough food. A deadly fever sweeps through the facility, claiming many of their friends. When Glory becomes ill, Lucy knows that if she’s taken to the infirmary, she’ll never come back. So she takes Glory and escapes.

But city streets are unfriendly to the poor, especially on winter nights. The girls suffer various mishaps. Finally someone tells them of “mudlarkers,” people who dig around in the muck by the river looking for things to sell. Lucy finds a dirty old doll with a quirky smile, setting off an unexpected series of events.

This book has some of the melodrama and fancifulness of a Dickens story. It was sweet and very well done. The audiobook was free for Audible subscribers at the time and wonderfully read by Bernadette Dunn.

I had not heard of the Christmas in My Heart series by Joe Wheeler, but apparently he’s compiled several books of Christmas stories, his own as well as others’.

The Best of Christmas in My Heart is made of several heartwarming stories from the series gathered over the years. Many are old-fashioned, but some are new. Most are fiction, but some, like John Cain’s account of Christmas in a POW camp, are true. I had not heard of most of the authors, but a few familiar ones are represented, like O. Henry and McCain. One story about a tablecloth made the rounds of the Internet a few years back.

Wheeler begins the book with telling how he came to start writing and then start compiling this series.

There are eighteen stories, so it would be easy to spread this out over December with almost a story a night.

That wraps up my Christmas reading! Have you read any of these? Did you read anything Chrismasy in December?