The Christmas Checklist: A Novel

Once I was in seventh grade, my English trainer, Mrs. Johnson, gave our class the intriguing (if considerably macabre) project of writing our personal obituaries. Oddly, I do not bear in mind a lot of what I wrote about my life, however I do bear in mind how I died: in first place on the ultimate lap of the Daytona 500. On the time, I hadn’t thought of writing as an occupation, a subject with a remarkably low on-the-job casualty charge.

What intrigues me most about Mrs. Johnson’s project is the chance she gave us to confront our personal legacy. How can we wish to be remembered? That query has motivated our species because the starting of time: from constructing pyramids to placing our names on skyscrapers.

As I started to jot down this ebook, I had two targets: First, I wished to discover what may occur if somebody learn their obituary earlier than they died and noticed, firsthand, what the world actually considered them. Their legacy.

Second, I wished to jot down a Christmas story of true redemption. One in all my household’s vacation traditions is to see an area manufacturing of Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. I do not know what number of instances I’ve seen it (maybe a dozen), but it surely nonetheless thrills me to see the change that comes over Ebenezer Scrooge as he transforms from a boring, tight-fisted miser right into a penitent, “giddy-as-aschoolboy” man with love in his coronary heart. I at all times depart the present with a smile on my face and a resolve to be a greater particular person. That is what I wished to share with you, my pricey readers, this Christmas — a vacation story to heat your season, your properties, and your hearts.

Merry Christmas —Richard Paul Evans