The stories of two women switch back and forth during two different times across a black walnut table in The Christmas Table by Donna VanLiere. Joan Creighton, in May 1972, watches her husband John take the wood from his pickup truck with her daughter Gigi who is five and son Christopher who is one. She hears his goal of a kitchen table by October although he has never built anything except frames before.
Joan is gob smacked when she learns she has breast cancer. She makes learning to cook part of her own therapy and an attempt to leave her children something to remember other than her intensifying illness, using her mother’s recipes with personal notes.
The time frame for John lengthens as Joan’s treatments for cancer that spreads to her lungs sabotages his time and their spirits, but he persists in between caring for her and the children. The date becomes Thanksgiving and then Christmas. Adding to his distress is the thought that Joan may not make it until Christmas.
Lauren Mabrey in May 2012, a former foster child with no family, has found one in Grandon in Glory’s Place where she volunteers in their after-school program. The workers witnessed her wedding a year ago and now are helping get her place ready for the child she is expecting. A real find is secondhand walnut table, refinished by a local builder, after he found it in a garage sale. The bonus is a set of recipes with handwritten notes in a hidden drawer.
As Lauren uses the recipes to learn to cook herself, she becomes caught up in the idea that they belong to someone who never meant to let them go and begins a search. Her only clue is the farmer named Bud in the notes where the original owner went to get the fresh milk to make yogurt.
The Christmas Table will appeal to those who have a woodworker in the family (like me) and to those who need a light enjoyable read for Christmas to take them away from the distress all around us.