If you’re looking for a Christmas entertainment in the same vein as A Christmas Carol or It’s a Wonderful Life, you could do much worse than picking up a copy of The Santa Shop, by Tim Greaton (if you’ve got a Kindle, it’s a free download as of the time of this posting).

The main character, Skip Ralstat, is a homeless man on the streets of Albany, New York. When he’s invited into a church by a kindly priest on a cold night, he refuses all suggestions as to how he might regain a normal life. He doesn’t want a normal life. He blames himself for the death in a fire of his wife and baby son, and he embraces social ostracism and suffering as his deserved penance.

But when he meets a strange homeless man who wears a dirty Santa wig, he hears of the town of Gray, Vermont, where there’s a bridge called Christmas Leap. Every year one homeless man leaps to his death from that bridge on Christmas Eve. Christmas Eve is the anniversary of Skip’s family’s deaths. It just seems right to him that he should go up there himself and pay the ultimate price at last.

He doesn’t understand the forces at work around him, though. There’s a conspiracy—a good conspiracy—of caring people who will force him to face the truth of his life and to understand the real value of what he’s lost and what he’s trying to throw away.

I found flaws in The Santa Shop (you guessed I would, didn’t you?). The book seemed to me overwritten in places, and sometimes the diction could be imprecise. But I was nevertheless wholly engaged in it, and I’d be lying if I denied that my eyes were damp when the story closed up (I should note that it’s a novella. A sample of the follow-up book takes up nearly half of the Kindle version file). The story is notable for having the feel of a supernatural story when in fact the only magic is the magic of God-inspired human love and kindness (exaggerated, I would say, but moving).

I think most Brandywine Books readers will enjoy The Santa Shop.