Tis the season for delightful Christmas and holiday themed short stories. Brandon Witt’s Christmas Miracles of a Recently Fallen Spruce is my first of the year and it was a wonderful start.
This super quick read (you’ll likely finish in less than an hour) is the story of Paxton, a single man who lives in the Rocky Mountains. His favorite part of Christmas is hosting his annual Gay Boy Christmas Dinner and he prides himself on everything running smoothly for the event (he’s a Type A who has a list for everything). While Christmas is all about the dinner, Christmas Eve is for Paxton and his annual snowshoe trek through the woods. This year’s journey is interrupted when Logan nearly kills him with an out of control snowmobile.
Once these two meet, sparks fly though, although Paxton can’t understand why Logan would fall for him. In several passages, Brandon uses a great technique of Paxton explaining how he believes something will happen followed by telling us how it did happen. I loved this glimpse into how Paxton’s mind worked. Logan was a surprise too. I’ll admit when I read the blurb about “Logan Charles’s careless enjoyment of his brother’s snowmobile…” I expected a different sort of character than I got.
It’d be awesome if Brandon revisited these guys so we can see where things go after the holidays. They’re very different personalities would make for some interesting reading.
