An Amish Christmas: A Novel Read online

  Praise for An Amish Christmas

  “This little book is a holiday charmer young and old will find appealing.”

  —The Free-Lance Star

  “This simple, compelling tale feels fresh like a brisk winter morning. It makes readers wish they could spend Christmas unplugged but reconnected.”

  —Lincoln Journal Star

  “Well paced, [with] strong, well-defined characters and emotional impact … If you enjoy heartwarming stories about families you’re going to love An Amish Christmas.”

  —Night Owl Reviews

  “A perfect balance between a good story and a good message.”

  —The Star-Ledger

  “The perfect holiday read.”

  —BookLoons

  “[Cynthia Keller] beautifully intertwines the two diverse cultures, bringing to light the challenges of the world in which we live today.”

  —Fresh Fiction

  “The story is beautifully told.”

  —The Roanoke Times

  “Filled with laughter and tears, An Amish Christmas is a fast-paced, contemporary story that will touch your heart…. Richly infused with complex and compelling characters, a timely plot, a feel-good storyline, old world values and a look at the Amish lifestyle, this story will stay in your mind long after the last page is finished…. The perfect book for the holidays.”

  —Romance Junkies

  “The lessons—that hard work is its own reward, that you should give selflessly and be thankful for what you have, that you can still raise decent children in this crazy techno-world—speak directly to how a lot of us are living our lives today. The story in no way suggests that we should all become Amish to be happy, but the vivid images Keller gives of farm life make you feel a little more peaceful inside. We can all use a little of that this time of year.”

  —Miami Herald

  “[A] story of forgiveness and the power of love.”

  —Tucson Citizen

  “This is truly a heartwarming story, not just for the holidays but for all year long…. Cynthia Keller takes you into their world and opens it wide for all to enjoy. An Amish Christmas is one book you will not regret picking up to read.”

  —Coffee Time Romance and More

  An Amish Christmas is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents are the products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual events, locales, or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental.

  Copyright © 2010 by Cynthia Steckel

  Excerpt from A Plain & Fancy Christmas copyright © 2011 by Cynthia Keller

  All rights reserved.

  Published in the United States by Ballantine Books, an imprint of The Random House Publishing Group, a division of Random House, Inc., New York.

  BALLANTINE and colophon are registered trademarks of Random House, Inc.

  Frontispiece art: © 2010 iStockphoto

  This book contains an excerpt from the forthcoming title A Plain & Fancy Christmas by Cynthia Keller. This excerpt has been set for this edition only and may not reflect the final content of the forthcoming edition.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Keller, Cynthia.

  An Amish Christmas : a novel / Cynthia Keller.

  p. cm.

  eISBN: 978-0-345-52380-8

  1. Amish—Fiction. 2. Christmas stories. I. Title.

  PS3572.I263A83 2010

  813′.54—dc22 2010015471

  www.ballantinebooks.com

  v3.1

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Excerpt from A Plain & Fancy Christmas

  Dedication

  Acknowledgments

  About the Author

  Chapter 1

  “You’re looking a little pathetic there, Mom.”

  As her daughter, Lizzie, entered the kitchen, the words startled Meg from her reverie. Leaning on both elbows at the kitchen’s butcher-block island, she’d been staring, unseeing, at the large tray of untouched cookies before her. She reached up to remove the tall witch’s hat she’d been wearing for the past two hours, and set it down beside the tray.

  “They’re such cute cookies, aren’t they?” Meg asked her daughter in a wistful voice. “Not one trick-or-treater this year. I can’t believe it.”

  Lizzie, her laptop computer tucked under one arm, paused to stare at her mother’s handiwork. “Dude, how long did it take you to make all these? They’re insane.”

  “Don’t call me ‘dude,’ ” Meg responded automatically. “I thought it would be fun to try something different. It wasn’t a big deal.”

  She had no intention of confessing to her fifteen-year-old how long the process had taken. After finally locating the correct chocolate cookies—the ones with the hollow centers—she had used icing to “glue” chocolate Kisses, points up, into the middles, then she’d painstakingly drawn hatbands and bows with a tiny tube of red icing. The result was rows and rows of miniature witch hats. Adorable. They would end up being tossed into the bottomless pits that were the stomachs of her thirteen-year-old son, Will, and his friends.

  “Honestly, why do you bother?” Lizzie’s muffled voice came from inside their walk-in pantry closet. Meg knew her daughter was grabbing her favorite evening snack, two Pop-Tarts that she would eat right out of the foil package. “No one cares. It’s stupid.”

  Meg quietly sighed. Maybe it was stupid to hang the tissue ghosts from the trees in their front yard. To carve the jack-o’-lantern that was the centerpiece of the arrangement on the front steps, with hay, gourds, stuffed scarecrow, and all. Okay, so Lizzie and Will were too old for the giant figures of witches and goblins that she’d taped on the windows. Lizzie was at some in-between stage, too cool to trick-or-treat but probably looking forward to next year, when some of the kids would have driver’s licenses. Meg anticipated there would be parties at different houses, no doubt with alcohol involved; she wasn’t looking forward to that phase. Will had also declined going from house to house this year, preferring to goof around with his buddies on someone’s driveway basketball court. But she’d thought Sam, her nine-year-old, might still have gotten a kick out of her decorations. Wrong. He never appeared to notice them, and he’d barely made it through a half hour of ringing doorbells before declaring he’d had enough of this holiday. What on earth had happened to Halloween being so much crazy fun, the way it was when she was a child? Didn’t kids know how to enjoy a holiday anymore? Besides, she was cutting back on the fuss; in the past, she would have spent hours baking cookies for trick-or-treaters. This year she had simply combined premade ingredients.

  Lizzie, armed with her snack, left the room as the jarring noise of the garage door opening announced that Meg’s husband was home. She watched James enter and set down his briefcase in the mudroom before coming toward her. He looked exhausted. As the top in-house legal counsel to a large software corporation, he more than earned his salary. Somehow he managed to withstand endless pressure, maintain constant accessibility, and coolly handle one crisis after another. And those were only a few of his job requirements, it seemed to her.

  Pulling off his suit jacket, he gave Meg a perfunctory kiss on the cheek.
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  “Happy Halloween,” Meg said brightly.

  “Ummm.” His attention was already on the day’s mail, which he retrieved from its customary spot on one of the counters. He was frowning as he flipped through the envelopes.

  “Something wrong?”

  “Too many bills, Meg.” He sounded angry. “Too many bills. It’s got to stop.”

  She didn’t reply. In eighteen years of marriage, James had rarely complained about their bills. Sure, he wasn’t thrilled with paying private school tuition for three children, but it was something he and Meg both wanted to do. Beyond that, it was understood between them and even among their friends that his wife was the saver and he was the spender.

  Meg had always understood that things were important to her husband. It was he who purchased the designer suits, their fancy watches, her expensive jewelry. It was he who booked the first-class vacations. He was the one, in fact, who chose this enormous house. Even with three children, Meg had no idea why they needed five thousand square feet in one of the most expensive sections of Charlotte.

  It was clear that growing up with very little had left a psychological scar on James that he tried to cover up with material trappings. She didn’t like it, but she understood. That was what he needed to feel comfortable. He didn’t brag or rub his success in anyone’s face. Still, it was as if he had to have more of everything just to feel he was level with everyone else.

  Recently, though, he seemed to have undergone a change in thinking. He had started complaining regularly about everything she and the children spent.

  “Are you hungry?” Meg moved to open the refrigerator door.

  He slapped the mail back down on the counter. “I mean it! The spending has to stop. We need to batten down the hatches.”

  She turned back to him. “You’re right,” she said soothingly. “We will—the hatches, I mean, and the battening. Now, can I get you something to eat?”

  “I don’t want anything,” he snapped. “I’ll be in my study.”

  Meg stared after him. Aside from his sudden financial prudence, he had been uncharacteristically irritable for a while now. And it had been getting worse, she realized, not better. She heard the door to his study slam shut. James was typically calm, even in a crisis. Especially in a crisis, she amended. That was one of the things she loved about him.

  They met as sophomores at the University of Illinois in a nineteenth-century American history class. Meg happened to sit next to him one day early in the semester. When he began to juggle a pen, an assignment pad, and an empty soda can, it made her laugh. She grew more interested in him when he was the only one in class who was able to discuss all the major battles of the Civil War before the reading had even been assigned.

  Their relationship had started out as more of a friendship. A little teasing back and forth led to some shared coffees, then pizza while studying for the final exam. Slowly, their connection grew and deepened. James proved to be a stabilizing influence on the flighty, directionless girl Meg had been. She had admired his strength, his solidness—not the physical kind but the kind that made her feel cared for and safe. Of course, she reflected with a smile, she hadn’t minded that he was tall and broad-chested, with thick sandy-colored hair and large dark eyes whose intent gaze made her feel she was the most important person in the room.

  By the end of junior year, it was clear to both of them that marriage would follow on the heels of graduation. While he went to law school, she set up their first apartment and helped support them by working in a boring but well-paying job as an administrative assistant. The plan had always been for Meg to go to law school once James had a job, but then she got pregnant with Lizzie, and that was that. Which was perfectly fine with Meg. She wouldn’t trade one minute of time with her three children for anything in the world. Working would have been impractical for her, anyway, since they had moved to three different states over the years because of the series of job offers that came James’s way. His drive and early success meant their lives were far more than comfortable. She and the children had everything they could ever need and more.

  Maybe too much more.

  She heard her older son coming downstairs—his feet, as usual, clomping rapidly rather than just walking. He was talking, his voice growing louder as he approached. “That is so sick, man!”

  Meg rolled her eyes, understanding this to be high praise for whatever it was Will was discussing. She called out to him.

  He stuck his head in the kitchen. He was slender and noticeably tall for an eighth-grader, with a face remarkably like his father’s. Will wore a dark-gray sweatshirt, his face nearly hidden in its hood. “Hang on,” he said to the room in general. “My mom, yeah.”

  Meg understood that he was using a hands-free phone. No doubt it was the newest, tiniest, most advanced gadget available. She swore that half the time she didn’t know if her children were talking—or listening, for that matter—to her, to one another, or to someone else entirely on a cell phone or computer. Much to her chagrin, her husband aided and abetted the children’s desire to be up on the latest electronic everything. It seemed as if he came home every other week with an updated version of some gizmo or other. The stuff just kept changing, rendering the previous purchases obsolete, but no one besides her seemed to mind. Though lately, she reflected, she hadn’t seen the usual parade of new electronic toys, so perhaps James had heeded her protests.

  “Will, what’s the story with the science-fair project?” She tried to keep her tone light. Non-nagging. “And I’d like to see what you’re wearing for the class photo tomorrow. No rock-band T-shirts, okay?”

  He merely gave her a look as if annoyed by her interruption, then was gone. She heard him resume his conversation in the hall. “Two hundred? So what’s the big deal?”

  “Well, I certainly straightened him out,” she muttered. She glanced at her watch. It was past the time she should have started hustling Sam into bed for the night; he invariably dawdled, dragging out the process as long as he could. This evening there had been his minimal trick-or-treating, admiring and organizing the candy he’d collected, and a full load of homework. He still hadn’t taken a shower to wash off the remnants of green face makeup from his zombie costume. Rushing now, Meg transferred the cookies to a large plastic container. She frowned as she hurried upstairs; she would have to return to finish cleaning up.

  She found her nine-year-old seated at his desk, pencil in hand, hunched over a math book. He barely had enough space for the book, as his desk was nearly buried beneath the array of papers, random objects, and unidentifiable pieces of who-knew-what. Her younger son collected—anything. Meg didn’t know why, but apparently Sam had never met a piece of paper, ticket stub, or souvenir he didn’t love. Marbles, miniature cars and action figures, stickers, small plastic animals, and rubbery novelty toys—all were held in equally high esteem. His collection wasn’t restricted to his desktop, however, or the desk drawers. Boxes and plastic containers of various sizes were scattered about his room, overflowing with the items Meg periodically gathered up from the floor. She didn’t want to think about how many shopping bags full of his stuff were shoved into the back of his closet and on its highest shelves. She was just grateful he restricted himself to smaller treasures. If he’d amassed something like train sets or rocks, they would have been in big trouble.

  “Sweetheart,” she murmured, her hand on his shoulder. “It’s late.”

  He looked at her and smiled. That grin always melted her heart. While Will looked like James, and Lizzie, with her chestnut-colored hair and hazel eyes, favored Meg, Sam was utterly unlike either one of them. His hair was shiny, almost black, and his brown eyes were so dark that they appeared black as well. Short for his age, with a slight build and pale complexion, he exhibited an inquisitiveness neither of his siblings did.

  His nature was different as well. He was far more prone than the other two to feel anxious. He worried and fretted over what might or might not happen in his life, in the
country, and in the world. He asked endless questions, which the family called “Sam’s what-if questions,” about how they would handle a wide range of disasters that might suddenly befall them. Hurricanes, fires, robbers, plagues, waterborne pathogens—Meg was often scrambling to explain how they would escape various calamities. Sam was her sensitive one. Even when the other two were younger, they hadn’t seemed quite as fearful. For several years, starting when he was four, Sam often refused to go places that, for some reason or other, sounded frightening to him. It might be another child’s birthday party or the beach or the zoo. No amount of reassurance could change his mind.

  Thankfully, that phase had passed, but when he got under the covers at night, Meg still spent a few extra minutes sitting on the bed, just hugging him. She knew that, at those times at least, he felt utterly relaxed and safe.

  Sam closed his math book and stood. Pale streaks of green makeup were smeared not just on his face but on his arms and T-shirt. There was an outburst of shouting downstairs as Lizzie and Will embarked on what Meg figured had to be their fiftieth argument of the day. Both Sam and Meg ignored the familiar sound.

  “Do I have to shower?”

  “Yes, sugar, and it has to be fast.” Meg smiled as she put her arm around him and led him toward the bathroom.

  It was nearly eleven-thirty before all three children were in bed and she had finished cleaning up downstairs. She was exhausted, but, as was her routine, she put on her nightgown and got into bed with her pink leather appointment book—a Mother’s Day gift from James two years before—and five pens, each a different color. She had long ago determined that assigning each family member his or her own color made it easier to keep track of who had to be where and when.