Story for the Week
Twenty-one years ago today, I waited for a call from my doctor telling me to come to the hospital to be induced. I was already on maternity leave because my due date was October 4. On October 13, I got the call to come in the next morning. Corinne wasn’t ready.
They started my Pitocin in the morning on October 14. They broke my water. By the afternoon of the 15th, I wasn’t anywhere close to having a baby, so my doctor opted to do a C-section. Around 8:30 in the evening on October 15, Corinne made her way into the world. I was a geriatric mom at the ripe old age of 39, but I had known my whole life that I wanted to be a mom. (In my 20s, I said I wanted two boys, but that is a story for another day. 😉)
Corinne was spoiled—mainly by her father—from the day she was born. Dennis was strict in a lot of ways. But he also made a point of buying Corinne everything on her list for birthdays and Christmas. I tried to tell him that he needed to leave some things for other people to buy, but he proved hard to rein in. It felt like he thought he could relive his own childhood with her.
The most classic example of this dates back to a Barbie laptop when Corinne was only about nine months old. Dennis was always on a laptop for one reason or another. Corinne would sit beside him on the bed and want to play on the laptop as well. Then one day, Dennis saw a Barbie laptop for $30 in the Toys ‘R’ Us sales flyer.
We went to the store, and I fully expected to buy just the laptop and go home. That first trip to Toys ‘R’ Us should have been a warning for what would come in future years. We left the store with a full cart, having spent 10 times what I expected.
Once Corinne started being able to actually ask for specific things, Dennis was toast. Let’s just say that the months of October and December—along with March or April, depending when Easter fell—hit the bank account pretty hard.
Over the years, Corinne’s lists became shorter as her tastes started to run more toward video games versus actual toys. She also realized how expensive it had been to be Mom and Dad as well as Santa Claus and the Easter Bunny, so I think she went easy on us. Now that she works, she buys a lot of things she wants on her own. I have to come up with my own ideas for her birthday and Christmas.
When Corinne was little, we made it easy for her to understand which gifts were from us. Santa and the Easter Bunny didn’t wrap the ones they delivered. So the gifts that had to be built or put together were from Santa and the Easter Bunny. We built them while she slept so she saw them immediately. Think Barbie Dreamhouse, wooden toy kitchen, Dora battery-operated car (which almost had to be taken apart and rebuilt to fit through the door to the office). Santa and the Easter Bunny got credit for the big gifts for a few years. It made our lives easier that we didn’t spend Christmas morning building everything.
For her birthday, we got all the credit, but we occasionally split the gifts between two different days. To this day, I always, always, always make sure I have something for her ON her birthday as well as on whatever day we actually celebrate. That stems back to one of her birthdays when she was around four or five. I made a promise to myself then that we would split up her gifts between her party and her birthday. And even though she’s been old enough to understand for a while, I never stopped the habit.
That particular year, Corinne’s birthday party was after her birthday. We usually picked the closest Saturday, so sometimes the party fell before the 15th and sometimes after. On the morning of the 15th that year, before she went to school, we let her open all of her gifts. She got everything she wanted, loved them all, and went off to school happy as a birthday girl should be. When her party rolled around a day or so later, she had a great time. We had a house full of friends and family, she got a ton of gifts, and everything went off without a hitch. Until she started to cry after everyone went home.
When we asked her what had upset her, she told us that we didn’t give her anything for her birthday. We reminded her of all of the gifts she opened a day or two before. She insisted that we didn’t get her anything. Then she said she received gifts from all her friends and from my parents and from her aunts and uncles. That’s when it dawned on us. In Corinne’s mind, her birthday was the day of the party. She hadn’t opened any gifts from us during the party, so as far as her four- or five-year-old brain was concerned, we didn’t give her a birthday gift.
From that point on, we saved one or two gifts for the day of the party. Once she was old enough to understand, we kept up the practice because by then it was a running joke.
In the book below, the male main character is visiting his sister’s family for Christmas, including his nieces who are three and six. He bought gift cards so they can shop online for whatever they want. When he sees the look on the face of the female main character, she helps him understand how the brain of a young child works.
“Do you think…” James says, as though this is actually challenging to consider, “that maybe they would rather have something…immediately on Christmas morning? Like, in their hands? Even if its subpar in every way conceivable?”
“Do I think preschoolers aren’t mentally at the point where they can grasp the value of delayed satisfaction? Yes, James. I think your nieces would take a bag of Skittles with more enthusiasm than a bicycle on a screen they have to wait for.”
Having raised a child (and a husband who sometimes acted like a child), I agree with her that kids don’t do well with delayed gratification…or early gratification as the case may have been with Corinne. 🤣 I miss seeing the excitement sometimes of her opening her gifts first thing in the morning. Last year, we celebrated the weekend before her birthday, so she got most of her gifts early (Weekend at a Cabin in the Middle of Nowhere, Wisconsin). This year, I promised to take her out for her 21st.
It’s true what they say that the days go slow but the years go fast. When Corinne and I looked through the pictures for this, she commented that she really has looked the same since childhood. That may be true, but 21 years still look a whole lot different.
Happy birthday, kid. I love you more than you can possibly imagine. 💞
Book Review
⭐⭐½
2.5 Stars for The Christmas Yes List by Melissa Ferguson
352 pages
Publisher: Thomas Nelson
Publication Date: October 6, 2026
I received an advance copy of this title from Thomas Nelson via NetGalley.
Publisher’s Description
All she wants for Christmas is a rejection.
Chloe Hollis is done being a people-pleaser. After one too many bad decisions—including a job that asked her to cross a line she couldn’t—she’s determined to change. Her plan? Collect ten nos before Christmas by asking strangers for the most ridiculous favors she can think of.
It should be easy.
But then? Then she meets James.
Instead of shutting her down, the charming out-of-towner keeps saying yes—to Christmas karaoke, to small-town holiday traditions, to every spontaneous, hilarious, totally chaotic idea she throws his way. And the more he says yes, the harder it becomes for Chloe to stick to her plan…or protect her heart.
************
Main Characters:
- Chloe Hollis – 25 years old, a life-long people-pleaser, recently quit her data entry job in Seattle and moving back home to Maple Hills in West Virginia
- James Stone – 30 years old, works in New York as the executive vice president of reputation management at a warehousing and freight company, visiting his sister and her family in Maple Hills, his sister recently bought an inn that used to be owned by Chloe’s great aunt
- Genie – Chloe’s childhood best friend, a second-grade school teacher
- Dominic Stewart – Chloe’s ex and the reason she left Maple Hills seven years prior, married to Stephanie who recently had their first baby
When an un-released title has already been adapted into a screenplay for this upcoming Christmas season, I expect a Hallmark Christmas Movie vibe. This will actually air on Great American Media, but you get the idea. The premise of this story is your traditional holiday movie. The two main characters end up in a small town at Christmas, and the spirit of the holiday brings them together. When I start watching cheesy Christmas movies this year (Pulled in by Cheesy Christmas Movies Every Year), I may watch it, but the book left a lot to be desired.
Serial people-pleaser Chloe quits her data entry job when her boss suggests a promotion and then promptly asks her to do something fraudulent. While doom-scrolling her way through depression that evening, she discovers a self-help book by a popular social guru Dr. Yelensky. Within 24 hours, she finishes reading and annotating Rejection Therapy: Reprogram Your Day to Reprogram Your Mind. The final two pages of the book outline a self-help plan that Chloe turns into a game she calls The Christmas No List. She comes up with a variety of rules for scoring her success, but what it boils down to is that she has to get 10 consecutive rejections by making outlandish requests to strangers. She gives herself the seven days leading up to Christmas to get to 10.
Cue her meeting James at the baggage carousel in the airport when he offers to help with her suitcase. She finds him attractive but expects them to go their separate ways until she sees him in the parking lot. Fully expecting him to reject her (that is the point, after all), she throws all thoughts of safety to the wind and offers him a ride. To her utter surprise, he accepts. While I understand the point was for him to say no, on what planet does it make any sense for a 25-year-old woman to even consider offering a ride to a complete stranger in the middle of nowhere, West Virginia? That struck me as just monumentally stupid.
During the drive to Maple Hill—because of course they’re both headed there—Chloe tries again and again to get him to answer her with a no. Every time she makes a crazy suggestion, she can see on his face that he wants to say no. But every time, he says yes because his goal, unbeknownst to Chloe, is to try more to live in the moment. So begins their journey.
The story has the feel of How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days—two people with opposing goals basically forced to continue to spend time together. I feel like the whole premise is flawed though. Chloe is a people-pleaser. I fail to understand how someone rejecting her makes her less of a people-pleaser. And with the exception of James, she asks the most ludicrous things. When it’s someone else, she asks things like if she can pour hot coffee into a neighbor’s flower bed. Or the poor man she annoyed to death while he was captive in the seat next to her on her flight.
“It’s been sixty-two minutes of torturing this man on this tiny plane connection from Chicago to Maple Hills, West Virginia, and, in the process, torturing myself. Asking if I could switch seats with him for the window, then getting said window seat and asking to switch back because I’d changed my mind. Pulling out my phone and asking for selfies together since we’d shared secrets (correction: I shared secrets with him, unprompted) and were now ‘close, close friends.’ Opening my Christmas novel to see whether he would mind terribly if I asked him to read it to me like I was a lady of leisure because I had a headache. Telling two painfully long stories about family reunions and extending invitations to visit. And finally, pulling out the old family scrapbook, which the quietest, most patient middle-aged man ever to exist deemed his last straw.”
But when she meets James, she offers him a ride from the airport, suggests that they do a “traditional” snow dance, asks him to watch the tree light up in the center of town to celebrate the first snow. She invites him to go shopping for a Christmas sweater. Her best friend Genie invites him on a camping trip. He gets invited to the family reunion. All of these are things he agrees to, but none of them is as extreme as what Chloe asks of others.
And again, Chloe being rejected doesn’t teach her to say no to others. She should be practicing telling other people no…but I guess that wouldn’t make for a very good story. 🤷♀️
When the conflict comes that tests the budding relationship between Chloe and James, Chloe confides in Genie. At first, Genie takes on the role of Chloe’s ride-or-die…as she should. But when the two of them are dissecting the events that lead up to the conflict between Chloe and James, I realized that Genie may very well be the reason Chloe is a people-pleaser…and to top it off, she’s mean.
“But I think, despite all good intentions, you’ve still gone off and accidentally gotten snared here anyway.” She puts up two hands. “It’s not your fault really. This was such a bizarre incidence running into a guy like him; I mean, how could you of all people withstand him?”
My shoulders are slumping lower by the moment.
I’m weak.
I’m weak and pathetic.
And I can’t say no. To anybody.
“You’re not walking but running into the arms of this guy who tells you that he wants you and who fulfills some deep desires, but at the same time…to what end? To what goal? You’ve got to grow up, Chloe. You’ve got to learn to say no before you really, seriously get hurt.”
Like I said: mean…like, Mean Girls mean. She seems like a horrible friend who basically expects Chloe to continue saying yes to her and no one else. There are multiple examples of Genie manipulating Chloe. After this conversation, Chloe agrees that she needs to talk to James about everything that’s happened. And when she does, Genie tries to insert herself into every situation, making it impossible for them to talk, as if she thinks Chloe needs protection from herself. Pick a side, Genie: Either you want her to listen to everything you say, or you want her to grow up and stand on her own two feet.
The author does relatively well with the banter piece of the romance, and I did like James as a character. It will be interesting to see how this plays out on-screen, but I fear this may be a case of the movie (possibly) being better than the book.
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