All Faculty Excerpts

Merry

This is an excerpt from Susan Breen's new novel, Merry.

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Does Merry Bingham need to put up six Christmas trees this year?

No, of course not. Five would be more than enough.

Neither does she have to have put candles in each of the windows of her pink Victorian house. Or order vintage tinsel from a private supplier in New York City. Or buy presents for everyone at her office, especially given how notoriously particular antiquarian book sellers are. Or try to get her three grown children to smile in a non-snarky way for the annual Bingham Christmas card. Or make homemade sugar donuts to hand out to all the people who drive by her house every year to admire the lights and ask her how much her electric bill is.

This could be the year that Merry Bingham is sensible about Christmas.

She knows she’s supposed to be sensible because everyone keeps telling her so. She’s fifty-five years old, and she’s supposed to be thinking about downsizing and cutting carbohydrates and being careful. She is not supposed to be crawling around on the roof, trying to attach Rudolph the Red-Nosed reindeer to the eaves. Especially not in the middle of a windstorm, though she does so love the feeling of being up high, the Hudson River stretched out beneath her, waves cresting like little sharks.

She’s never fallen off the roof before! Not even close.

So, all right. She was stupid. And she was lucky the yew bushes broke her fall. Now her ribs are banged up and she had to have an X-ray. She’s back home and totally fine, except her entire body hurts when she breathes in, she feels like she hears a train rushing through her ears.

You’re not twenty-five anymore, her doctor said, which she thought was hostile. As though she doesn’t know that. As though she does not know she is the same age her father was when he died. As though she has not spent the bulk of her life worrying about all the things middle-aged people are supposed to be worrying about. Whether she’ll ever pay off her credit card bills and whether she and her husband will have enough money to retire on and whether her children will ever find happiness. Her beloved children who can’t seem to look at each other without snarling. She knows perfectly well she overdoes it when it comes to Christmas, but how can she not?

Christmas is about a miracle. Christmas is about how the world changed completely over one silent night. Christmas is about joy, redemption, transformation, and yes, bells and whistles and lights and reindeer. Christmas is the exact opposite of being sensible and Merry doesn’t care if she goes soaring right off the roof again and again; she is not surrendering Christmas.

In fact, she comes from a long line of people who do not surrender.

Starting with her ancestor, one little Nora Villard, who at the age of ten, waylaid Charles Dickens on a train on his way to New York City and persuaded the Great Author to give her his copy of A Christmas Carol—which he autographed.

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Reprinted with permission from Penguin Random House. You can purchase Merry by Susan Breen here.