Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons

I thoroughly enjoyed Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons. I love her book Cold Comfort Farm (which the library book clubs will be reading in May) so I had to check this out when I saw it on the library shelf. It is a collection for stories first published in 1940 (although the stories appeared in a number of magazines).

One minor caution - there is only one story about the family from Cold Comfort Farm, and it's one of the least impressive in the collection. Still, I forgive whoever named the book after that story because I would probably not have noticed the book otherwise.

Romance plays a large part in many of the stories, and yet they are more than love stories. There are stories with twist endings, but many end up right where you expect them to end. The people in the stories feel like real people that you know, and the small snippets of their lives feel like real things that did, or could have, happened. There are characters I disliked, and characters I cheered for. There are characters who learn something, and I learned something at the same time.

These are not epic stories about earth shattering events, but they are well written and utterly charming. I'm still thinking about many of them! I highly recommend Christmas at Cold Comfort Farm to anyone who likes good stories about everyday people going about their everyday lives (and who is willing to read stories written 70 years ago).