Author John Grisham, most famous for his thrillers “Time to Kill,” “The Firm,” and “The Pelican Brief,” departed from his normal genre to write “Skipping Christmas,” and took a hit from the critics because of it. The movie based on the book, “Christmas with the Kranks,” also tanked at the box office. With all this negative press, I got curious and picked up a copy of the book.
Our story begins with Luther and Nora Krank taking their daughter Blair to the airport the Sunday after Thanksgiving. Blair has joined the Peace Force and is going to Peru. Nora is struggling to deal with her emotions, as is Luther, but Luther is much more prosaic about sending his only daughter clear around the world. After Blair boards the plane, Nora begins to worry that she’ll be all right, a question that she begins to ask Luther several times a day.
On the way home from the airport, Luther dashes into a store and sees that they are already putting up Christmas decorations. This makes him start to think about all the money they have spent on the holiday over the years, and that night he pulls out a spreadsheet to find that they spent over six thousand dollars the year before. It’s ridiculous, that’s what it is. A plan forms in his mind and he presents it to Nora.
With Blair gone, there’s really no need to go all out for Christmas. In fact, they should just skip Christmas altogether and go on a cruise instead. They’d save about three thousand dollars. Nora is game, and they decide that they’re not going to hold a party, or decorate a tree, and they are definitely not going to put their giant Frosty on top of their roof. That causes problems with their neighbors, who have won the award for the best decorated neighborhood in the past and they want to win again.
The book ends with everyone coming together to bail out the Kranks when an unexpected circumstance arises. Some parts of the book are campy and come across more like a slapstick comedy than a touching Christmas story, but it was fairly enjoyable. It’s definitely different from Grisham’s other books, so what I recommend is that you read the book for what it is and just put the author from your mind.
(This book was published in 2001 by Doubleday.)
John Grisham: Best Selling Novelist