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The Christmas Shoes, by Donna VanLiere
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Already a Christmas classic, The Christmas Shoes, is an extraordinary tale based on the remarkably popular song of the same name. The heartwarming story by NewSong instantly soared to the top of the charts, mesmerizing listeners. The books has captured the hearts of readers everywhere.
The Christmas Shoes follows the paths of a man and a boy through one fateful, snowy Christmas. Beautifully rendered and poignantly touching The Christmas Shoes tells a take of hope, love and faith.
- Sales Rank: #48725 in Audible
- Published on: 2003-11-21
- Format: Unabridged
- Original language: English
- Running time: 179 minutes
From Publishers Weekly
Two couples find their lives transformed by a Christmas gift in VanLiere's debut novel, a gooey holiday parable that leaves no stone unturned in its pursuit of tear-jerking moments. Robert Layton is an ambitious lawyer who sacrifices his youthful idealism to become a partner and specialize in bankruptcy law. His ambition backfires, though, when his wife, Kate, announces that she wants a divorce from her often absent husband, throwing family life into chaos right before the holidays. Meanwhile, on the other side of the tracks, another couple anticipates impending tragedy as young mechanic Robert Andrews tries to prepare his family for the coming death of his attractive wife, Maggie, from ovarian cancer. The two families' lives critically intersect when Layton goes Christmas shopping and encounters Andrews's young son, Nathan, trying to buy a pair of shoes for his mother as a going-away present. When the hard-hearted lawyer sees that the boy is short of cash, he ponies up for the purchase. The transformation that follows makes for a heartwarming story, and VanLiere writes some affecting family scenes that contrast the material poverty of the Andrewses with the spiritual poverty of the Laytons. But the story's beauty is marred by the author's nonstop holiday clich‚s in both assorted characters and passages of decidedly preachy prose.
Copyright 2001 Cahners Business Information, Inc.
Excerpt. � Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.
THE CHRISTMAS SHOES (Chapter One)December 1985
We did not dare to breathe a prayer,
Or give our anguish scope.
Something was dead within each of us,
And what was dead was Hope.
—Oscar Wilde
The first big snowstorm of the winter of 1985 fell on Thanksgiving. After that, another massive storm seemed to enter the area every few weeks and drop inches, or even a foot, blanketing the landscape and making the town look like a Christmas card, long before the holiday arrived.
Schools were closed more times that winter than in the previous five years combined. Nearly every week, Doris Patterson finalized the lesson plan for her second-grade class, only to have to change it entirely due to yet another snow day.
After twenty-nine years of teaching, Doris was accustomed to the unexpected. Where some saw chaos, she saw opportunity. When the principal announced an early dismissal over the PA system, Doris tried to think up a fun, new assignment for her students, to accompany the traditional spelling and math homework. Assignments like What are the flowers thinking beneath the snow? or When do birds make reservations to fly south? Though simple assignments, she’d seen them stir her students’ imaginations, creating wonderful memories for her scrapbook.
In the last couple of years, Doris had considered retiring but, for whatever reason, had always felt she wasn’t ready. Until now. She’d recently informed the principal that this would be her last school year. Her husband had retired four years earlier from the post office. He was anxious to hit the wide-open roads with her in a brand-new RV he’d purchased, with “Herb and Doris” airbrushed in blue and pink on the spare-tire cover. Maybe it was all the snow there had been that year, but warm winters in the Southwest had begun to sound good to her.
Doris never showed favoritism outwardly, but every year there was one child in her classroom who captured her heart. In 1985 that child was Nathan Andrews. Nathan was quiet and introspective. He had sandy hair, huge blue eyes, and a shy smile. Doris noticed that his gentle nature was lacking the spark she’d seen in his previous two years at the school. While other students interrupted her with “Um, Mrs. Patterson, Charity just sneezed on my head” or “Hey, Mrs. Patterson, Jacob just hit me with a spitball,” Nathan made his way to her desk without calling attention to himself and whispered, “Excuse me, Mrs. Patterson.” He’d then wait patiently until she turned to him. Compared with the boisterous natures of the twenty-five other eight-year-olds in her class, Nathan’s measured, serious disposition was, almost in a sad way, beyond his years.
Some of her colleagues maintained that children from poorer homes were harder to teach, had more disciplinary problems, and were generally mouthier than those students who came from middle- to upper-class homes. Doris disagreed. She knew Nathan’s family could be considered lower income. Mr. Andrews worked at a local auto-repair shop and, people said, could barely make ends meet. Yet in all her years of teaching, Nathan was one of the most polite children she’d ever met. Doris had learned that it wasn’t the size or cost of a home that created kind, well-adjusted children, but the love and attention that filled that home.
Nathan’s mother had often volunteered at the school in the early fall. She had helped out in Doris’s classroom, cutting out shapes and numbers for a math lesson, sounding out words for a student struggling with phonics, or stapling paper flowers and trees on the bulletin board. Nathan would beam with pride at the sight of his mother. But Doris hadn’t seen Maggie Andrews in many weeks.
One day her husband, Jack, had come to school to tell Doris that his wife was seriously ill. Maggie Andrews had cancer, and the prognosis wasn’t good. No wonder Nathan often seemed distracted. He was not old enough to fully understand the situation and probably didn’t know that his mother was dying. But some days Doris could see it in the boy’s eyes, a terrible sadness she recognized.
Her own mother had died of cancer when Doris was only twenty, and that single event had indelibly changed her. Her heart broke for the little boy as she watched him erase a hole into his paper, smoothing the tear with the back of his small hand as he continued with his work. She’d never had a student in her class who had lost a parent, and she found herself at a loss for words or actions. Somehow the gentle hug or extra playtime she’d given over the years to children who had lost a precious pet or extended family member seemed inadequate, even inappropriate. She still remembered that after her mother’s death, she had wished that people would say nothing at all, rather than the trite, though well-meaning words they’d offered in sympathy. Sometimes being quiet is the greatest gift you can give someone, Doris thought, as she watched the boy sharpen his pencil, something terribly heartbreaking in the way he struggled to turn the handle. She whispered a silent prayer for God to draw near and wrap the little boy in His arms.
I slammed the phone down in my office. For the umpteenth time, I had tried to make a call, only to hear a busy signal in my ear. The day was short on hours, and I was feeling even shorter on patience.
“Would somebody tell me how these new phones are supposed to work?” I shouted out my office door to my secretary.
Gwen Sturdivant, my assistant for the past ten years, hurried in to help me.
“First, make sure you select a line that isn’t lit up,” she explained.
“I know that, Gwen,” I said, exasperated. “I’m thirty-eight years old. I’m familiar with the general uses of a telephone. I want to know why I hear that stupid busy signal every time I make a call.”
“Once you dial, you need to wait for the tone and then punch in one of these codes for the client you’re billing to.” Gwen calmly demonstrated.
When I had started with the firm, the phone bill, along with the electric bill and office expenses, had been paid from the firm’s general receipts. Now everything—the fax machine, the photocopier, the office phones—all had a code. As soon as someone could figure out how to program it, my pager would have a code too. Ordinary tasks like dialing the phone had been made more frustrating so the firm could bill our clients right down to the penny.
“Just get Doug Crenshaw on the phone for me!” I groaned.
I had been at Mathers, Williams & Hurst for thirteen years. Like many young attorneys, I had walked in the door a bright-eyed, naively optimistic law-school graduate. We were a small firm at the time, sixteen lawyers, but the location was perfect—only a few miles from my mother’s home. My father had died of a heart attack five years earlier, and I wanted to move closer to my mother so I could keep an eye on her, in case she needed anything. My wife Kate’s family lived only three hours away, so she couldn’t have been more pleased when I took the job.
I spent the first day at MW&H in conference, a conference that had lasted thirteen years: conferences with clients, conferences with other associates, conferences with the firm’s partners, conferences with secretaries, conferences with paralegals, conferences at lunch, conferences over the phone. The visions of wowing a courtroom with my verbal prowess faded as the firm’s partners shifted many of their bankruptcy cases onto my desk. I had not minded the work at first. It was challenging and fun in the beginning, helping owners of small businesses and corporations liquidate their assets, seeing so many zeroes on a page reduced to one lone goose egg. Somehow my position within the firm as “the associate who helped with bankruptcy cases” changed over the years to “our bankruptcy associate.” After I got over my initial disappointment and accepted that my dream of becoming a hotshot courtroom brawler was not going to play out (the bankruptcy cases that made it as far as the courtroom were invariably simple presentations of fact, never the in-your-face litigating tours de force I’d always dreamed of performing), I buried myself in the bankruptcy files to impress the partners. My position within the firm established, I concentrated on every young law student’s goal: to become partner in just seven years.
I found that once I put my mind to a task and worked at it diligently, things came together as I had planned. Even with my wife, this seemed true.
I met Kate Abbott during my last year of law school. From the moment I saw her, I was smitten. She had recently moved into the neighborhood where I was sharing a small apartment with five roommates. My parents had paid for my books and tuition, on the condition that I support myself by taking on odd jobs to pay for food, rent, clothes, and whatever car I could afford. Meals in those days consisted of macaroni and cheese, Ramen noodles, and the rare special of Five Burgers for a Buck at the local Burger Castle. I owned one suit that my parents had bought me for my college graduation, three pairs of jeans, several ratty sweatshirts, two button-down shirts, a pair of loafers with a hole in the sole, and a pair of old running shoes. I would have felt my wardrobe was pathetic had not my roommates’ clothes looked exactly the same.
I first saw Kate unloading boxes and secondhand furniture from the back of a U-Haul van. I set out to meet her, and then, once I met her, I set out to marry her. She was raven-haired and lovely. A certain melody filled the air when she laughed. We married a week after I finished law school.
Like most new law graduates, I was poor and saddled with debt. Kate continued her work in the marketing department of a small local hospital while I looked fo...
Review
"A heartwarming story."--Publishers Weekly�"Heart-tugging...an inspiring Christmas story." --BookPage
"A delightful book."--Tampa Tribune & Times
"Heartwarming."--The Sanford Herald
"Has precious gifts for all of us." --The Washington Times
Most helpful customer reviews
25 of 28 people found the following review helpful.
Touching story!
By Tiffany Ann Rogers
I started this book late last night and got up VERY early to finish reading. It was just such a quick read and so sweet that I didn't want it to end.
As you know from the title it is a story that is set during some various holiday seasons over the years. There are actually two stories that are intertwining together. The narrator is a successful lawyer named Robert. Robert has used his success and money to buy his family's love and is coming the realization that money can't buy love. The other story that we see is the story of Nathan, a third grader, who's mom is dying of cancer. A chance meeting on Christmas Eve intertwines the lives of Robert and Nathan together in a meeting that will affect the rest of their lives. In this meeting Robert realizes that the smallest things in lives are what matters and sets out to change his outlook on life.
This is one of the first books that I have cried over in a long time and cry more than once I did. As a teacher I was just touched by the kindness that Nathan's teacher showed him and as a person I was touched by the kindness of others in the book.
I have never heard the song that this book is based on, but now I hope I get the chance to. I also hope that you get the chance to read this book. It is wonderful.
13 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
A sweet, sappy tear-jerker
By amazon3131
This quick read is touching, tear-jerking, and a little overly sweet. It stereotyped characters and preachy passages will keep it off the list of the all-time greats in literature, but chances are good that you won't regret reading it anyway.
The story line is fairly straightforward: the loving, but poor, family is having its life turned inside out as the mother dies; the boy makes brief, but life-changing, contact with a worldly-minded, money-driven attorney whose wealthy family is crumbling from neglect.
The story is told primarily from the point of view of Robert Layton, the lawyer.
This is a three-hanky book; don't read it in places where crying will be embarrassing.
It is particularly recommended for people who have lost loved ones, especially around significant holidays, and healthcare professionals who care more about people than about the (admittedly important) scientific details.
12 of 13 people found the following review helpful.
Wonderful Chritsmas Classic
By Sebastien Pharand
The Christmas Shoes is bound to become a Christmas classic. It is heart-warming, intelligent and very touching. It is the perfect book to read during the holidays, or if you need to find something to cheer your soul up a little. It is the perfect book to put you into the Christmas mood.
The book contains two stories. The first is of Nathan, a young boy who's mother is dying of cancer. This will be her last Christmas as death is just around the corner. Nathan wants to make this Christmas the "best ever" for his mother. The second story is about Robert, a man who has just realized that he has put his business life in front of his family for way too long. When his wife tells him that she wants to leave him, Robert realizes that he has been a bad father and husband all these years and sets out to make things right again.
Both stories are wonderfully written and very entertaining. They also both offer great 'visuals' of Christmas as both famlies try to make this Christmas the best of their lives. Both stories are filled with hope, desire and love.
This is the perfect holiday book, the best of its kind since The Chirstmas Box. Its everything that you'd look for in a Christmas story. This is one book that I waill faithfully come back to every December from now on, in order to prepare myself to the wonders and joys of Christmas.
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