The other day I got a request to present a storytelling program for Christmas. My heart sank. My Christmas story file is very thin. Why, when Christmas music is so wonderful, are Christmas stories so soppy?

Why, when the actual Biblical Christmas story is so vigorous, full of suspense, intrigue, magic, and poignancy, are Christmas fictions so prone to cliché? Burdened with this prejudice I approached Christmas in Canada by Rick Book with some trepidation. Multicultural moose at the manger?

Three sentences into the first story I relaxed into pleasure. A troupe of mummers bursts into a Newfoundland kitchen. “In stormed a five-man rogue wave of tomfoolery.” Now this was a voice I wanted to listen to. It turned out to be the first of many plums in a rich pudding of a story collection.

The two dozen stories in Christmas in Canada are original fictions by Book, but he has used an inventive variety of sources for his material. Some – the mummers’ story, for example – are family and community anecdotes. Some – like “The One Who Became a Wolf” – incorporate native legends. Some grow out of Christmas carols. Yes, Jean de Brebeuf and the Huron Carol are included. Some – like “The Order of Good Cheer” about Samuel de Champlain – are based on historical documents. One – “Les Habitants du Richelieu” – is an imaginative reconstruction of the circumstances in which Cornelius Krieghoff created his painting of the same name.

The voices of the stories are similarly and deliciously varied. In one farcical romp we hear the plummy tones of two twitty Englishmen on the gold trail. In another, as the protagonist talks to a dog, we hear the open-hearted voice of a mentally handicapped man, a person who walks through his world expecting goodness. To me the most memorable voice was that of “The Lost Herd,” a story of an Alberta rancher who sets off in a storm to find his cattle. Book can be funny, extravagant, and baroque, but here he is plain, as plain as killing cold. “Thirty-eight below. Wind sucking the snow out of every secret place, its icy fingers redrawing the terrain of southern Alberta like one of those flour and salt maps the kids used to make in school.”

Book has done a broad sweep of Canada, from Cartier to now, from ocean to ocean to ocean, and from the aboriginal people to a recently arrived Kenyan immigrant. What saves this from Department of Multiculturalism artificiality is simply that Book is an excellent writer. His description of the women’s hockey team of Rideau Hall in 1893 sparkles with mischief and joy. He conveys emotion in gesture. He remembers to tell you what things smell like.

Many of these stories are about the business of adult life and they assume some historical and cultural background as the texts are mercifully not gummed up with explanations. Thus the potential audience for this collection is both wide and specific. First of all, it is a Dad book. If you’ve given Dad or Grandpa all of the Pierre Bertons, this is a good choice for Christmas. The second potential audience is families. Sitting around in a turkey-logged state, any family group would appreciate the bracing digestif of a dandy ghost story set in a lighthouse with the chilling line: “A colder human being she had not touched.” Finally, this is a book for professional storytellers. Tired of little angels? Contact Rick Book and ask for permission to tell.

The relationship of this collection to the oral tradition is the source of its strength and also of a principle that leads Book astray, if only twice. Two stories didn’t work for me. Both are reminiscent in tone and both are too long. The story of a black CN porter on the Winnipeg-to-Vancouver run over Christmas contains fascinating details about the actual job, and a revealing portrayal of racism, both from the public and within the organization. And an account of a vet who returns to Holland for a VE-Day anniversary contains much carefully researched history. Both ramble in the entirely authentic tones of an elderly uncle, but neither is actually a shaped story. I suspect that affection and respect for his sources got in Book’s way in these two examples.

On the subject of sources, three cheers and a glass of wassail to Book and to Red Deer Press for appending a list of acknowledgements. Book names the people whose stories he gathered, from a volunteer at the Canadian Heritage Bushplane Museum in Sault Ste. Marie to a translator in Shanghai to a member of the AIDS Committee of Toronto. One glimpses the story behind the stories, which must have included much travel, much listening, and many cups of coffee. Such a list is useful and gracious. More than that, it provides an image of how stories happen – gathered, shared, stored, reworked, given away, linking us in a web of narrative across times and cultures. Christmas spirit? This book does it for me.