In a dusty little town at the Junction, a four-year-old boy named Will'm waits with unbearable patience for his grandmother to finish waiting on customers and return to the Christmas story she was telling about the Camels and the Star. His older sister Libby knows more about Santa Claus and guides his young belief with gentle authority. The two children are filled with Christmas excitement, but their world is about to shift in ways neither anticipated: their father is bringing home a new mother, and the siblings must journey to meet her. Annie F. Johnston captures something achingly true about childhood waiting, the way those final minutes before Christmas morning stretch into eternities, and how the magic of the season becomes tangled up with the magic of new love entering a family. This is a story about learning to believe in both Santa Claus and in the possibility that a stranger might become someone who belongs to you. Written in 1915, it carries the tender, unhurried warmth of a world where children sat in notion shops listening to their grandmothers, where letters to Santa mattered, and where becoming a family was as mysterious and hopeful as any Christmas miracle.
