FOLEY, Ala. — When "A Christmas Ride — The Miracle of Lights" opens, it’s all too painfully familiar. For the fictional Warner family, author Edie Hand says Christmas Day “loomed ahead like a dreaded dentist visit.”

Robert, the father, is a workaholic. Meg, the mother, makes excuses for her husband. And the kids, 14-year-old Tim and 12-year-old Julie, want to be anywhere but where they are, namely, in a car with their parents on the way to a time-share condominium in Colorado for Christmas. Heck, there isn’t even any snow.

Sadly, few things fail to live up to expectations the way Christmas does. Family angst is, unfortunately, as much a part of the holidays as pumpkin pie and stuffing, and that’s why many readers will instantly resonate with the Warners in this novella of 163 pages published by Parkway Publishers.

Fortunately for the Warners, a revelation of sorts is in the making for them, only it won’t happen on the “Christmas Ride” with which the book opens. Nor will it happen on the “Christmas Ride” the following Christmas, “when the bitter, biting snow raced sideways, and a deathly-cold wind whistled in from the north.”

No, it will be five years later before the next “Christmas Ride” produces “The Miracle of Lights” that the Warners as a family so desperately need. By then, the family is coming apart at the seams. The parents are separated. The children aren’t talking to each other. Tim blames his mother for the parental breakup. Eventually, however, they visit that “isolated crest” in the mountains where they can see the peak of Bald Mountain where “The Miracle of Lights” awaits.

“You have to be in the right place at the right time before you can even hope to appreciate the beauty and wonder of it all.”

"A Christmas Ride — The Miracle of Lights" is an inspirational book that will be warmly received in our southern culture. Author Edie Hand, who wrote the book with Jeffery Addison, has southern roots and those come through in this novella about family, Christmas and miracles, all of which create a metaphor about keeping Christ in Christmas without actually using those words or getting too preachy. Jeffery Addison is a pen name for author Don Keith, who lives in Indian Springs Village, Ala.

The writing in "A Christmas Ride — The Miracle of Lights" is as clean and crisp as some of the mountain air the Warners breathed. The time span covered in the novella is years, so at times details are sparse and character development lean, but, again, a southern readership will by and large identify with the authors’ purpose in writing this book. It’s a quick read but one suspects that between the lines are real-life events that make the Warners’ experience as a family not only painful and uplifting but realistic.

The look of the book itself is eye-catching and beautifully designed. This would make an excellent Christmas gift for a person who holds onto and believes in the miracle of Christmas. The authors no doubt hope that such a person isn’t in the minority.