Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Gift of Christmas: A Special Collection of Joyful Holiday Stories is the fourth such collection I have read. Instead of the typical 101 stories, this collection warrants its “special” status by containing 121.
Tears filled the eyes of many storytellers which is Chicken Soup modus operandi. Instead of my own eyes brimming with tears I could only roll mine Heavenward. I understand that these are personal and sentimental stories, but most of them are only two and three pages long, which made all lachrymal activity seem a bit extreme.
In spite of the increase in the number of stories, I was not moved by them enough to take notes. Only one story tugged at my emotions, “A Home for Christmas” by Tina Marie. In four pages the author wrote about being adopted at the age of six by an older couple who were desperate for children, and her first Christmas spent with them.
The formatting was careless, as an excessive number of two-line widows packed the book with exaggerated pagination. What a waste! Yet another page with only two lines of text on it. Any editor would have endeavoured to squeeze in a few more words on the preceding page.
Not even the three compilers or editors trapped this monstrosity of incorrect tense (the italics are mine):
“Grandpa didn’t get cheated out of time with his family; in fact, he had more time than he would have if we would have all gathered in his living room to open gifts and eat dinner.”
The paragraph from which that passage was pulled was full of sentences in the conditional past, and it was awkward to read that particular line since the conditional past wasn’t even necessary there. Simply use had.