ed_rex

Christmas stories — especially deliberate Christmas stories — offer even an experienced writer every chance to fall into the trap of writing didactic and saccharine fables in place of real stories. For a novice, they are a treacherous territory indeed. I think the following passage will give you a pretty good idea of whether or not Anthony R. Cardno's venture into that realm of sentimentality and miracles might work for you.

As you can see, Cardno's Christmas story is one of magic, aspiring towards myth, but with a hard-to-swallow side-order of Relevance and Allegory.

In the proverbial nutshell, The FirFlake: A Christmas Story is the story of Saint Nicholas himself (better known to those of us on the left side of the Atlantic as Santa Claus) and of the origins of his annual pilgrimage to the homes of each and every child in the world on Christmas Eve.

It is a children's fable and, maybe, below that a story about the telling of stories. But for me, if the surface tale doesn't hold my attention I have little interest in delving for the subtext.

And I'm afraid I'm not going to do so for The FirFlake ...

The truth is, I don't want to write this review.

There, I said it. I don't want to write it because I believe that Anthony R. Cardno is a nice man (we've interacted online) and, more, that this slim volume is a labour of love on his part. Worse, The Firflake is a self-published book and if I can't promote such efforts, I'd just as soon pass them over in silence. I doubt my opinion matters much to the likes of Gregory Maguire, but it might have some noticeable effect on smaller fish in the literary seas.

On the other hand, Mr. Cardno took the time and expense to send me his chapbook and so I feel duty-bound to take him at his word and treat his work seriously.

So. Let's talk about fairy tales, about Christmas stories and about why it's so hard to do them well.