FAITH, HOPE & CHOCOLATE CHIP CANNOLI
the Christmas stories
Kelley Hunter
Published by Some Fluffy Books at Smashwords
Copyright 2011 Kelley Hunter
All rights reserved.
This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.
This is a work of fiction. Names, characters, places, and incidents either are the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events, or locales is entirely coincidental.
Those Magical Christmas Cannoli
Faith, Belief, and Those Jingle Bells
Excerpt-Everything She Didn’t Know
If you’ve purchased this book, I thank you. All proceeds my books earn are donated to charity, and now you’ve helped me to make a difference for some wonderful organizations. So I truly appreciate your support.
If you’ve borrowed or sampled this book, I thank you for reading as well. A story is nothing but sorry little words on a page unless it’s allowed to come to life by being shared and read. I do hope you’ll enjoy mine. Regardless, I love that you’ve let it come to life, and I hope you’ll consider purchasing another down the road. Make sure you keep scrolling once you finish as well. I’ve included some extra excerpts of some upcoming books of mine. Maybe check them out.
Anyway. Once upon a time, I wrote a blog. A not so bad blog, I like to think, as far as blogs go. It was fun, and I made some true friends from the experience, but like most blogs it was also time consuming. Too time consuming. So I locked it and shut it away. I miss it sometimes, though. Like I said, it was fun. So. As a treat to myself, I’ve compiled seven of the original short posts about my family’s holidays. Poignant, funny, quirky, they’re here. I hope you all get a kick out of them as much as I do…
And please, if you do enjoy this e-book, or any book, it’s so wonderful to let others know. Spread the word, leave reviews, drop that author a note. Books, writers-we are nothing without you, the reader. So I do. I thank you.
My best,
Kelley Hunter
A special thanks to my editor, Natalie. You poor thing, you. xoxo.
Also, much gratitude to the Romance Writers of America organization and their chapters, who’ve been kind enough to let me judge as well as enter (and place!) in their contests. Those experiences, and the participating authors’ kind and helpful advice gave me the confidence and skills to keep going. As a struggling new writer, I was very fortunate to place in several contests ( RWA, screenwriting, and others). Had I not, I don’t think I would have had the courage to finish a book, never mind find an agent for it, or see it published. But I did. And it’s all their fault. So I thank you from the tip of my toes to my very sad split ends.
Lastly, I can’t forget the doctors and staff at Children’s Hospital in Boston. We’ve had to spend too many holidays with them, and yet they always treat our children and us as one of their own. You are my heroes.
December 23rd had come, but the letter hadn’t. My son was frantic.
You see, every year our post office put out a very special mailbox, one that’s just for letters to Santa. And every December, Alex dropped off his note for the Big Guy. A week later, just like clockwork, a return letter and bag of magic reindeer food arrived from the North Pole.
Except this year.
The morning of December 23rd had come, but a letter had not.
Now, to be fair, I’d been extra preoccupied this holiday season. A lot was going on with his brother medically, and other things had tugged at me, so I hadn’t done my usual double check of the letter before he’d mailed it. So I had my sneaking suspicions about what had gone wrong.
"Did you include your return address?" I asked.
Alex gaped at me like I'd grown three heads and turned magenta. "Why would I do that?” he asked. “Santa knows who I am. He knows where I live."
Oops.
But here was the bigger dilemma: this was Alex's pivotal year. Some of his friends had told him that there is no Santa, that he doesn’t exist, throwing him into a desperate quandary. His friends are good kids. They don't lie. But he’s also surrounded by believers, avid believers he loves with all heart and who’ve told him there’s a Santa Claus since his very first Christmas. So for the first time in his life Alex was struggling with doubt.
I understood it. And I told him it was okay. He’ll come to his own decisions, in his own time. But I also explained that with every act of charity, of giving, of love and hope, Santa’s as present in that moment as if he was physically there.
He gaped at me like I'd grown three heads and turned magenta. "I have no idea what you just said, Mom." Then he stomped away.
The problem was this newly sprung doubt had lead to a greater weight, a greater importance, being placed on his letter's arrival. If Santa never answered, well.
I did all I could do. I reassured him I would stop at the post office while out on errands. That I would find out all I could. So I did just that.
The post office was packed. The line weaved out the door and along the sidewalk. When I finally made it up to the desk, the clerk was harried. Tired-looking. But she had a weary smile on her face.
"How can I help you?" she asked.