A Bare-limbed Season

How THREE AUTHORS HUNT CHRISTMAS--and a multi-book GIVEAWAY!

Friends,

Consider how many chapters compose a life.

Daily, authors Jaime Jo Wright, Sara Brunsvold, and I (Cheryl Grey Bostrom) tap both lived and imagined experiences that populate such chapters. Then we write them into stories that fill our novels. Again and again, it’s what we do.

But this December, we took on a fresh proposition: What if we explored our own stories and hunted the infusion of Christmas into each? Where and how could God’s story gild and translate ours?

We accepted the assignment. Each of us set out to discover Christ in our past or present Christmases—and share some of our findings here. As you read our accounts, we hope you’ll reflect on your own stories—and find Him in them, too.

Along the way, you’ll see links: Be sure to enter our SPECIAL CHRISTMAS GIVEAWAY as we hunt for Christmas together!

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This year, my Christmas will be a bare-limbed season, because . . .

After back-to-back years when icy northeasters kept us hunkered inside, our family Christmases migrated two states south, following the warm pull of kids and grands settling into new California homes and rhythms. Blake and I join them when we can, happily swept into the noisy thrum of stockings and cinnamon rolls, ribbons and packages, kids and pets and Christmas Eve church by candlelight.

But some years—when livestock or dogs, weather or health insist—we stay put, and the Christmas we hunt arrives as quietly as owls.

This will be one of those years: a whispery Christmas, where our pace imitates stoic winter’s, and where our heart-limbs go as bare as the maples and aspens on our land. Stripped of summer’s fluttering green, we’ll welcome neighbors who need a perch, and as we tend our roots, we’ll help tend theirs.

Bundled against frigid Pacific Northwest rain—or, if a northeaster has its say, into snow and wind sharp enough to snap bone—we’ll also hike when we can, traipsing fields and trails in a world rinsed or frozen to its honest colors.

Each step, each visible breath will remind us of the physical distance between us and family we love, and the gift inherent in our hunger to be with them: the truth that relationship found is worth the yearning, worth the hunt.

And past piercing cries of hardy northern flickers, we’ll seek our Maker.

Christmas, hunted this way, becomes less a calendar date and more a clearing-out. A scrubbing. A reorientation. As we walk, the clamor of the year rubs off like old bark. What matters comes forward—the priorities and hours that gleam when polished by attention, pointing us toward what deserves our time and tenderness.

And then, in winter’s starkness, Christ’s love again descends upon and wells within us—in forests and pastures, shorelines and hills. In the faces and gestures of those around us. Where wind and the Word sing the intimate revelation of Whom we cannot live without.

Of Emmanuel, God with us.

In the Christmas we hunt, the One we’re searching for finds us, welcomes us. Leads us home.

Our Jesus.

“And the Word became flesh and dwelt among us, and we have seen his glory, glory as of the only Son from the Father, full of grace and truth.” —John 1:14

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Enter the Giveaway

Sara Brunsvold’s Journey Begins ...

Sara Brunsvold is the Christy Award-winning author of The Extraordinary Deaths of Mrs. Kip and The Divine Proverb of Streusel. She creates stories that boldly engage contemporary issues through the lens of hope and unshakable faith. Her passion is to connect with readers first through books, then through meaningful conversation. She lives with her family in Kansas.

She writes this about Christmas:

Grandma loved to tell the story. Every time it rolled from her memory, her eyes would sparkle, and her thin, pale lips would stretch into her cheeks as if she were that small girl in her parents’ farmhouse again. “We children would wake up on Christmas morning, and every surface of our little kitchen was covered in cookies. Everywhere, cookies . . .

Continue the journey with Sara HERE!

Enter the Giveaway

Jaime Jo’s Journey Begins ...

Jaime Jo, is a coffee-fueled and cat-fancier extraordinaire who has entwined her life with her pirate, Captain Hook, and two side-kicks who think they’re adults. They’re not. She resides serenely in Wisconsin’s rural woodlands with her six cats, an axolotl, and too many houseplants to be reasonable.

She writes . . .

I looked in old corners, up dusty stairwells, in forgotten closets, and in trunks of old memorabilia. Christmas eluded me this year. I could hear the soft echoes of Gramma Wright’s laughter, and the cry of alarm when my dog’s wet nose touched her hand. I could smell the gingerbread cake wafting through the air as Nat King Cole crooned “Chestnuts Roasting on an Open Fire” . . .

Continue the journey with Jaime HERE!

Enter the Giveaway

Here’s what you can win:

1 of 3 CHRISTMAS GIFT BUNDLES!

From Sara: A tin of gourmet Christmas cookies paired with a copy of her third novel, The Atlas of Untold Stories.

From Cheryl: Cheryl’s The View from Goose Ridge devotional, and all 3 of her novels: What the River Keeps, Leaning on Air, and Sugar Birds.

From Jaime: A coffee sampler, a copy of her book Night Falls on Predicament Avenue, and a vintage photograph bookmark to remember legacies.

ENTER THE GIVEAWAY HERE 🌲

Other bookish stuff:

📙📙📙 The WINNER of last month’s giveaway is . . .

BETH REIMER!

Congratulations, Beth! You won Sy Garte’s wonderful new book Beyond Evolution: How New Discoveries in the Science of Life Point to God! Please reply with your mailing address, and I’ll send it right off to you.

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I hope you all have a magnificent Christmas, friends. Whether it’s traditional, bare-limbed, or somewhere in between, may our Christ warm your soul.

And may you be like my friend Joyce, who, upon learning she couldn’t clone herself, rejoiced anyway.

Love,

Cheryl

P.S. Christmas gift ideas! Through Tuesday, December 2, all three of my novels are 50% off at Tyndale!

A keen student of the natural world and the workings of the human heart, Pacific Northwest author Cheryl Grey Bostrom captures the mystery and wonder of both in her surprising and critically acclaimed novels Sugar Birds, Leaning on Air, and What the River Keeps. Most recently, Kirkus Reviews awarded What the River Keeps a prized Kirkus Star and named it a Best Indies Book of June 2025. An avid birder and nature photographer, Cheryl lives in rural Washington State with her veterinarian husband and a pack of half-trained Gordon setters.