Surviving Christmas


Book Description

This book is designed for anyone who spends time helping others. Therapists get paid for this service, but if youve ever interacted with a family members, friends, or acquaintances during a holiday season, you also can benefit from this book. It outlines how people can remain happy and sane despite the stresses of the most hectic season of the year. With this book you can not only survive the holidays, but carry the gift of an overflowing heart, healthier body, and rejuvenated spirit back with you after all the wrapping paper and decorations are long gone.




Surviving Christmas


Book Description

This novella is a holiday sweet treat that's sure to please. Jack Hastings is not looking forward to spending Christmas with his messed-up family. His goal is survival. But plans change when he wrecks his car, sprains his ankle, and ends up stranded on a Texas ranch. Sofie, who rescued him off the side of the road, is beautiful and engaging, but her teen sister and imposing dad make it hard to spend time alone with her. And he wants to. It’s Sofie’s job to make Christmas merry. Every year, Sofie De Los Santos drives back to the Rocking Double Heart ranch where she grew up and spends the holidays making memories with her dad and sister. But when she almost hits a stranded stranger with her car, he becomes part of her very-merry project. Her dad might not be too keen on her bringing home a random guy. But Jack is quite charming and good-looking. It’s funny to see such a city guy on the ranch, but he meshes well with her family. Even her dad seems to like him, which is a first. Maybe it’s the magic of the season, the undeniable attraction, or the stolen kisses in the barn, but by the end of the week, she’s head over heels for Jack. And when they go home, he promises to call, but he doesn’t. It was silly to think that their spark would survive…




The Surviving Christmas App


Book Description

Sisters Sam and Shelly’s blissful Christmas of violent video games and selfies is interrupted when their sentimental mother wants the family to watch the legendarily awful Christmas dog movie Santa Woofs! That’s when a mysterious Surviving Christmas App is uploaded on Shelly’s phone. Then, even though there is a blizzard, mysterious people keep showing up at the house with unfinished school worksheets and sudden marriage proposals. When a preacher arrives with thick accent and a pack of rowdy orphans, the sisters have to figure how to outwit the Surviving Christmas App. Christmas comedy One-act. 30-35 minutes 10-20 actors, gender flexible




Skipping Christmas


Book Description

#1 NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • A classic tale for modern times from a beloved storyteller, John Grisham offers a hilarious look at the chaos and frenzy that have become part of our holiday tradition. Imagine a year without Christmas. No crowded malls, no corny office parties, no fruitcakes, no unwanted presents. That’s just what Luther and Nora Krank have in mind when they decide that, just this once, they’ll skip the holiday altogether. Theirs will be the only house on Hemlock Street without a rooftop Frosty, they won’t be hosting their annual Christmas Eve bash, they aren’t even going to have a tree. They won’t need one, because come December 25 they’re setting sail on a Caribbean cruise. But as this weary couple is about to discover, skipping Christmas brings enormous consequences—and isn’t half as easy as they’d imagined. Don’t miss John Grisham’s new book, THE EXCHANGE: AFTER THE FIRM!




Chronic Christmas


Book Description

Chronic Christmas is an Advent calendar full of self-care tips to help people with chronic illness savor the holiday season as never before. Author Lene Andersen has lived with rheumatoid arthritis for most of her life and is a health advocate and writer. Using her distinctive conversational style infused with warmth and humor, she has crafted a unique guide to an enjoyable Christmas season. Each Advent entry will enable the person with a chronic illness and their friends and family to connect in ways both effortless and fun. Chronic Christmas is guaranteed to help you relax and save your time and energy for what is truly important. The book also includes a few surprises along the way!




How to Survive Christmas


Book Description

Christmas is looming. Will your mother-in-law present you with yet another hideous jersey this year? How are you going to cope with Granny's peke or the undesirable in-laws? Has the row about where to spend the holiday already started, and it's only August? Jilly Cooper has the answer to everything. Whether you should seek refuge in the cooking sherry or suggest a wholesome family walk, Jilly offers, in her own irrepressible style, sound but often hilarious advice about how to get through the roller-coaster ride we call Christmas. With the help of the perfect Christmas family - Scarlett O'Aga, the Xmasochistic housewife, her wayward husband Noel, his seductive mistress Ms Stress, their four delightful children Holly, Robin, Carol and Nicholas, and their dog Difficult Patch, we learn how to survive this most demanding of occasions. Whether you love Christmas or loathe it - this is the ideal book for you.




Dreams That Die


Book Description

A young man arrives in Hollywood from Scotland looking to scale the heights as a screenwriter. He embarks on a series of adventures and misadventures as he encounters a succession of the weird, wonderful and downright wacky. To get by he works as an extra on sitcoms like Friends and Frasier, dramas such as ER and CSI, and some big budget movies. He then finds himself being selected to work as Ben Affleck’s double. In between times he attends celebrity parties, functions and works in some of Hollywood’s most exclusive bars and nightclubs. Our narrator joins the antiwar movement after 9/11 and commits himself with his new found comrades to halting Bush’s drive to war in Iraq. He throws himself into organising demos, meetings and campaigning to stop the war. Soon he’s leading a double life - by day working on a big budget movie as a double for one of Hollywood’s biggest stars; by night engrossed in radical politics.




Christmas as Religion


Book Description

In Christmas as Religion, Christopher Deacy explores the premise that religion plays an elementary role in our understanding of the Christmas festival, but takes issue with much of the existing literature which is inclined to limit the contours and parameters of 'religion' to particular representations and manifestations of institutional forms of Christianity. 'Religion' is often tacitly identified as having an ecclesiastical frame of reference, so that if the Church is not deemed to play a central role in the practice of Christmas for many people today then it can legitimately be side-lined and relegated to the periphery of any discussion relating to what Christmas 'means'. Deacy argues that such approaches fail to take adequate stock of the manifold ways in which people's beliefs and values take shape in modern society. For example, Christmas films or radio programmes may comprise a non-specifically Christian, but nonetheless religiously rich, repository of beliefs, values, sentiments and aspirations. Therefore, this book makes the case for laying to rest the secularization thesis, with its simplistic assumption that religion in Western society is undergoing a period of escalating and irrevocable erosion, and to see instead that the secular may itself be a repository of the religious. Rather than see Christmas as comprising alternative or analogous forms of religious expression, or dependent on any causal relationship to the Christian tradition, Deacy maintains that it is religious per se, and, moreover, it is its very secularity that makes Christmas such a compelling, and even transcendent, religious holiday.




Screen World


Book Description

(Screen World). "An invaluable reference guide for anyone who loves film." Back Stage Movie fans eagerly await each year's new edition of Screen World , the definitive record of the cinema since 1949. Volume 56 provides an illustrated listing of every significant American and foreign film released in the United States in 2004, documented with more than 1000 color and black-and-white photographs. The 2005 edition highlights Clint Eastwood's Million Dollar Baby , which won four Academy Awards, including Best Picture, Best Director, Best Actress in a Leading Role (Hilary Swank) and Best Actor in a Supporting Role for Morgan Freeman, his first Oscar. Martin Scorsese's The Aviator picked up five Academy Awards. Other notable films include Hotel Rwanda starring Academy Award nominees Don Cheadle and Sophie Okonedo. As always, Screen World 's outstanding features include: Full-page photos of the Academy Award-winning actors as well as photos of all acting nominees; A look at the year's most promising new screen personalities; Complete filmographies; A comprehensive index; and more.




Analyzing Christmas in Film


Book Description

Film plays a vital role in the celebration of Christmas. For decades, it has taught audiences about what the celebration of the season looks like – from the decorations to the costumes and to the expected snowy weather – as well as mirrors our own festivities back to us. Films like It’s a Wonderful Life and Home Alone have come to play key roles in real-life domestic celebrations: watching such titles has become, for many families, every bit as important as tree-trimming and leaving cookies out for Santa. These films have exported the American take on the holiday far and wide and helped us conjure an image of the perfect holiday. Rather than settling the ‘what is a Christmas film?’ debate – indeed, Die Hard and Lethal Weapon are discussed within – Analyzing Christmas in Film: Santa to the Supernatural focuses on the how Christmas is presented on the deluge of occasions when it appears. While most Christmas films are secular, religion makes many cameos, appearing through Nativity references, storylines involving spiritual rebirth, the framing of Santa as a Christ-like figure and the all-importance of family, be it the Holy family or just those gathered around the dining table. Also explored are popular narratives involving battles with stress and melancholy, single parents and Christmas martyrs, visits from ghosts and angels, big cities and small towns, break-ups and make-ups and the ticking clock of mortality. Nearly 1000 films are analyzed in this volume to determine what the portrayal of Christmas reveals about culture, society and faith as well as sex roles, consumerism, aesthetics and aspiration.