When I was growing up, my family personified the holidays. My father was a real-life Clark Griswold, digging up Christmas trees that were too tall for the living room and overdecorating them in a single color (only ONE color, which varied year to year: green, red, blue, silver). My mother was Mrs. Claus. She put out manger scenes and bought enough tinsel to drape the Rockefeller Center tree. My grandma (Viola Shipman, my pen name) loved Christmas most of all. Her home was absolutely drenched in lights, and her yard and roof were filled with inflatables dancing to holiday music. She had the most beautiful heirloom Christmas ornaments and bought so many gifts for our family that she had to create a walkway in her living room to get through them all. And don’t get me started on the holiday cookies—shaped like Santa, holiday wreaths and bells, reindeer—topped with icing as thick as snow.
I loved Christmas, too. And I loved winter as well, from making snow angels to sledding down the biggest hill in our little town. One of my favorite memories is of standing up to my waist in snow as a kid after a historic snowfall. My older brother, Todd, had carried me out and—plop!—dropped me into the middle of the snow as if I were as weightless as another flake. Then we built a snowman that was the envy of the entire neighborhood. Our Frosty was mammoth. My dad brought out a stepladder so we could build it to the sky, and my brother let me adorn it in any way I wanted. So I designed my snowman—as I describe in The Secret of Snow—to resemble the two of us. Our Frosty sported the mittens my grandma made for me, and its top hat was my brother’s favorite ball cap.
And then tragedy struck our family. Todd died when he was only seventeen. I was thirteen. As you can imagine, his loss shattered our family. It not only redefined our lives but it also changed the way we celebrated the holidays. For many years, my family sleepwalked through the holidays, hoping they would pass as quickly as possible. Christmas became a shadow of its former self, devoid of decoration, celebration and emotion. In time, we tried to kick-start the holidays again, but it wasn’t the same because my brother was missing. Todd wasn’t there to sneak into the living room to unwrap and rewrap his Christmas gifts. He wasn’t there on the Fourth of July to show me how to shoot bottle rockets into the caves that surrounded our cabin or toss cherry bombs into the water to watch them smoke. He wasn’t there at Thanksgiving to steal a piece of pumpkin pie and blame it on me.
He wasn’t there.
There was an empty chair at the Christmas table. There were no more snowmen. There was a void under the tree where his gifts should have been. There was a hole in all of our hearts.
Two people returned Christmas to me: my grandma and Gary.
I remember sitting on the couch watching TV one Christmas with my grandma. It was just the two of us, and A Charlie Brown Christmas came on. I got up and changed the channel immediately.
“I thought this was your favorite holiday special of all time?” she asked.
“It was,” I said. “When I used to watch it with Todd.”
“No, it is,” she said, “and it always will be.”
My grandma told me that running from my memories would never change what happened—it would only erase what Todd had meant to us and always would mean to us. She told me we needed to celebrate who he was again as well as the holidays, or we would never be whole.
“He helped make you who you are, didn’t he?” she asked. “And that’s not only worth remembering at the holidays, it’s worth celebrating every day.”
I wept that year when Charlie Brown saved that little tree, and I wept when Linus reminded us of the true meaning of Christmas. It was healing and cathartic. I felt whole again, not halved. I felt my brother with me for the first time in decades.
Decades later, after my grandmother had passed, I met Gary, who returned the spirit of Christmas to my parents. Gary embodied Christmas. He decorated more than Martha Stewart, he sang holiday songs twenty-four seven and he believed in embracing holiday tradition.
And so we commenced decorating seven trees—and still do to this day (we’ve even added a few more!)—in different-themed ornaments (family heirloom, Radko, midcentury, cabin, beach…). We baked cookies, we volunteered, we shopped and lit candles and went to church and drank eggnog and made holiday cookies with my grandma’s holiday cookie cutters. We moved to Michigan, and I reembraced winter. I went sledding and snowshoeing and all the things Sonny does in The Secret of Snow.
And in the last years of my parents’ lives, they celebrated Christmas with all of the spirit they had done decades before. My mom and dad were able to embrace their son’s memory again, all because of the power of hope and the holidays.
The Secret of Snow is based on these deeply personal memories. I think it might be my favorite novel to date because it is so meaningful to me. I hope it speaks to your heart.
A few years ago, my friend author Nancy Thayer said, “Wade, if anyone should write a Christmas book, it’s you.”
I knew exactly where to start. I love the holidays—from Christmas books to Peanuts specials to the carols to Hallmark Channel movies—and I’d always wanted to write a holiday novel. The Secret of Snow is very funny and very sad, but most of all, like all of my novels, it’s filled with oodles of hope, family memories and heirlooms. It’s filled with characters from my own life: Sonny’s mother is very similar to my own mom (who was very wise and funny and also a hospice nurse), and Joncee is a replica of my own brother. And, well, Sonny is a lot like me.
I truly hope you love reading The Secret of Snow as much as I loved writing it.
There is a passage in the novel that sums up the power of winter as well as the struggles and pain we all endure in life.
Winter can change a person. It can show you the delicate structure of the world when everything is stripped clean. It can illuminate your soul when the world is cloaked in darkness. It can warm your heart when everything else is frozen. It can let you hear your own thoughts for the first time when the earth finally falls silent.
But mostly winter can let you see the silhouette of your body’s branches—like a tree in February—when all the leaves are off, the green is gone, the adornment stripped away and, for the first time, you can appreciate all the knots, bends, broken limbs and lightning strikes.
You can see the beauty that has been created in harsh times.
Wishing you the merriest of Christmases and happiest of holidays! And I will see you this spring with another brand-new novel.
XOXO,
Viola