The Lost Christmas Gift

Sixty years after his father left to be a mapmaker in the war in Europe, Emerson Johansson received a package that had been lost in the mail for decades. The package contained a most extraordinary gift: an exquisite book Johansson s father lovingly handmade detailing an extraordinary adventure they shared together just months before his departure. This book tells the tale of how father and son set out into the mountains on Christmas Eve to cut a tree, but get caught in a dangerous blizzard. Lost in the snow, they are helped by a mysterious figure, a silvery man who does not speak but leaves them a series of gifts that help them survive and who ultimately leads them home in an almost magical way. The enigmatic man's image is not captured in the photographs the boy took with his new camera, pictures he believed, until now, were long lost. Little did he know that his father had taken the photographs, and drawing on vellum overlays from his own memory of that night's events, meticulously reconstructed, mapped, and narrated their adventure, revealing that the curious man in the woods was, in fact, no stranger, but somebody well known to us all. This book, destined to become a Christmas classic, is a faithful facsimile of the magnificent handcrafted present Johnasson s father sent him, and a poignant reminder that the best gifts, of memory, family, and the kindness of strangers, transcend time but never our understanding.