Cole Family Christmas Now Available!
Ruble peered over their shoulders at the wish book. She could already see the dolls featured among the toys. Dressed dolls with fine hair in perfect ringlets, rag dolls with long skirts, and baby dolls with large bright eyes. Her hands itched for their turn to thumb through the book’s pages, and she marveled at Mama’s extraordinary instructions. The children had never been allowed to select items from the wish book before.
The wish book. This amazing year, the nine children in the Cole family have been allowed to sit down with the Sears, Roebuck and Company catalogue to choose the gift they would most like to receive for Christmas. This is a rare event, for the Coles are not wealthy.
Indeed, Cole Family Christmas is the true, tender, and wholly unforgettable tale of a coal miner’s family. The story takes place in the small company town of Benham, Kentucky, in a time (1920) and place when coal was king and families made their precarious living mining the dirty and sometimes deadly coal.
When one of Mama’s few possessions, a treasured purple glass bowl with fluted edges, is accidentally broken by exuberant children rushing in from the outdoors, and an unlikely blizzard prevents Papa from coming home after working extra hours at the coal mine on Christmas Eve, the stage is set for a Christmas morning in which gifts are given and received that no one could have predicted.