A Christmas Homecoming

Christmas should be a time for happy moments in the company of your loved ones, a time for righting wrongs, fulfilling wishes, rediscovering treasures, and happy returns… The heroines and heroes of the short stories in the collection you’re holding wish for a beloved person to reappear by their side, someone they lost through their own carelessness, rashness, or selfish desire to constantly experience “something new”…

In Markéta Harasimová’s story Time of Miracles, the attractive forty-something Vlasta feels that the upcoming Christmas will be the worst holiday of her life: due to a thoughtless decision to leave her family, she has lost her faithful husband and teenage son, and a battle with a malicious disease looms on the horizon. But when else can a long-awaited miracle happen, if not at Christmas? Of course, she must be the one to earn it.

Josef, the main character of Josef Pepson Snětivý’s autobiographical story Christmas Under a Blanket, also thinks for a long time that he can only take – and that his partners are the ones who should give. He avoids meeting his attractive girlfriend's young son and, with feigned confidence, tries to forget the fateful woman he lost years ago. She unexpectedly returns to his life at Christmas, but under dramatic circumstances… and only to present him with the bill for his “carefree ride.”

In Alexander Stainforth’s story The Christmas Bride, young Elizabeth heeds the treacherous warning of her “best friend” and rejects the man of her dreams, Marquess Andrew, whom she was supposed to marry. Luckily, her kind and wise grandmother is there to lure first her offended grandson and then his former fiancée to the lonely country estate! She thus gives both young people the most beautiful Christmas present: the return of a love that never really left, it just needed a little help.