A Christmas fable for all ages.
Every winter, the magical Christmas Deer visits the Christmas Trees growing on Faith Mountain. "I promise that your life will bring The Return of Light to the humans," he says. Then he bows his head and touches each mature tree with his starry antlers.
One year, however, he pauses before Treewing, a fir tree who's too young to be harvested. The Christmas Deer touches him anyway, telling him that he has a special destiny.
Cut down and transported to a Christmas Tree lot in the city, Treewing waits anxiously for a happy family to buy him, take him home, and love him. But this doesn't happen, and after all the other trees have been sold, he's left all alone. Treewing struggles to understand the Christmas Deer's message. If no one wants him for their Christmas tree, what is his special destiny?
At last, on Christmas Eve, the friendship of a young boy, a precious baseball, and a group of homeless people help Treewing understand his special role in bringing The Return of Light to those who need it most.
When I was a little girl, we had an artificial Christmas tree. It lived patiently crammed in a dusty box in the basement all year. Every year on December first, my father hauled it upstairs. We opened the rather bedraggled branches and stuck them into the wobbly pole that formed the tree. Then the fun part came, making homemade ornaments and decorating the tree. What magic! It was our tree, and I loved it. It was Christmas. So special.
Then one year I went with a friend to a Christmas tree lot to help her family pick out their tree. I gloried in the real trees, in their majesty, in their fresh evergreen smell. I loved the ritual of picking out a tree: whirling them around to find their best sides, rippling the needles to check for freshness. Trees were living beings to me. How I wished my family could have a real Christmas tree. But after Christmas, I was always sad to drive by the lots and see all the lonely trees, those who had not been chosen by some happy family, those who had no children to love them, those who had not been decorated like kings. This still saddens me, even now that I'm grown up.
I always felt called to write a story about a Christmas tree who could not find a home. This thought simmered in my mind for many years. Then one Christmas, as I was shopping for my own Christmas Tree—I always have real ones by the way, one of the benefits of being a grownup—when I saw a homeless woman push a loaded shopping cart past the Christmas tree lot. She paused for a moment, and gazed toward the trees, her eyes hungry and wistful. At that moment, I made the connection between homeless trees and homeless people. That at last sparked the idea for my new novella called The Return of Light: A Christmas Tale.
