Reading Group Guide

excerpt

Christmas sings to the aged, to those who wish to hear it. The song fills the hollows left by faded dreams, lost youth, and the pain of missing loved ones, gone before their time. The young hear it, too. The melody whispers promises of what might be, of golden dreams, of a future brighter than the present in which they live. This is a Christmas story, a tale that changed the lives of the people who lived it. It’s a story of miracles that might have been . . . or yet could be.

Prologue

There are years in our lives that change us, mold us forever in some way. I was eight years old that Christmas, too young to really understand all the undercurrents swirling around me.

It is only now, fourteen years later, as I graduate from Michigan State University and prepare for a job in the health care industry, that I am able to look back with the clarity to see that Christmas for the miracle it truly was.

Back then, during that summer of 1994, with the trees leafed out and the sun warming my shoulders through a T-shirt that hung down to my knees, I didn’t realize disaster lay just a few months ahead. I only knew I wanted to buy the beautiful clock in the window of Tremont’s Antiques as a gift for my grandmother, Lottie Sparks.

I didn’t know that in trying to buy the clock, I would meet the people who would change my world, and my life would never be the same.