Title: The Christmas Sweater
Author: Glenn Beck
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Date: 2008
ISBN: 978-1-4165-9485-7
Length: 284 pages
Quote: “The Christmas sweater sat on the top shelf of my closet for many years.”
This started out as a true story. The true story was commonplace, so Beck tightened it up, made it stranger. What he ended up with is a visionary tale of how an ordinary twelve-year-old boy, who (reasonably enough) resented getting a sweater for Christmas instead of a bicycle, learns about the virtue of gratitude. Both time travel and angels are involved.
It's a well written, moving novel.
I expected a reiteration of a life lesson for aunts, which this aunt’s stayed close enough to her inner child not to need. Teenaged fashion victims exist here and there, but no right-minded child ever wants to receive something to wear for any gift-giving occasion. Clothing is basic. Children expect clothing to be supplied by adults. Even if a hand-knitted sweater is appreciated as a show of love, it’s still a basic item, not a present. (And if children’s metabolism happens to run high, they think of winter gear as yucky bundles of heavy lumpy itchy stuff people force them to put on when they’re not cold, and it’ll be many a long cold day before they even want to look at a sweater under any circumstances.) For Christmas, birthdays, baptisms, graduations and other accomplishments, children expect and deserve things to have fun with. Between a bicycle and a sweater there’s no contest. Any child would rather have the bicycle.
What The Christmas Sweater delivers, however, is the spiritual testimony of a grown man, disguised as a story for adults about a child. I’m not sure about the propriety of fictionalizing spiritual testimony but I respect this encounter with a layer of “soul” Beck doesn’t usually bare.
Would I share this book with a child by way of preparing the child for the news that, regrettably, its parents are so penniless and desperate that they can’t buy the child a real present, and so insecure that instead of explaining their financial desperation they’re going to try to pass off food or clothing as a present? Meh. Read it yourselves and consider any children you know who may be in such a situation, but I say any right-minded aunt would buy, make, or hand down a real present for the parents to give to that child. (I learned this from my “Aunt Dotty,” the best aunt ever.)
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