The Paperbag Christmas by Kevin Milne

Book description:

Dr. Christopher Ringle is the last person you'd expect to find moonlighting as Santa Claus at the mall on the day after Thanksgiving. But it is there that he meets a young man named Molar Alan, who desperately needs a new perspective on the underlying value of Christmas. Dr. Ringle recruits Mo and his older brother as volunteers at a nearby children's hospital for the holiday season. At the hospital, Mo is tasked to help bring holiday cheer to the young cancer patients on the fifth floor. His biggest challenge is befriending a decidedly angry girl who is so embarrassed by her scarred appearance that she hides her face behind the safety of a paper bag.

My review:

 I am not big on Santa, so I was a bit dubious about this book. To my surprise, it was not at all what I was expecting.

  Though this book is fiction, I found it to be a very touching story. I laughed through the hospital Christmas pageant, and found myself crying as two very different kids gave their own unique Christmas gifts to God. The book definitely had its sad moments, yet the message of the reason for Christmas comes through in the end and there are enough high points in the book to make the book a great read. I am highly recommending it.


About the author:

Kevin Milne was born in Portland, Oregon on June 13, 1973. Nearly eighteen years later he graduated from high school in Sherwood, Oregon, a small country town outside of Portland. From there it was off to college, where he studied anything and everything that caught his interest.

In his first two years as an undergraduate student he changed majors almost a dozen times, studying such varied fields as film, journalism, communications, philosophy, pre-dentistry, advertising, pre-law, pre-medicine, political science, and German, then finally earned a Bachelor of Science degree in Psychology. Just about the only thing he didn’t study was business, which, ironically, is what he chose to pursue in graduate school, earning an MBA at Penn State University in 2000.

Today, Kevin is a business professional by day, an author by night, and a husband and father around the clock. He and his wife, Rebecca, were married in Washington DC in 1995. They now reside in Kevin’s hometown of Sherwood, Oregon, where they are the proud parents of five children: Mikayla, Kamry, Mary, Emma, & Kyler (aka "the boy").