Philip Lee Williams | Author
QUESTIONS FOR DISCUSSION
1. The novel focuses a great deal on family and holiday tradition. What holiday rituals and traditions did you and your family share when you were a child?
2. How significant is tradition to family? Has the importance of family togetherness changed in the technological age? Has society shifted totally from family tradition, and does this concept have a place in today's society?
3. Williams recently returned to live near his childhood home. Discuss the impact that uprooting makes—specifically in regards to children. Have you revisited the area in which you grew up? What feelings were evoked? How did the experience affect you? Do you feel that you could live there again?
4. This novel describes Christmas in a small Southern town. Are the themes in the novel universal or exclusive to Southern life? Are there aspects of the novel that are regionally based?
5. What part of this novel is the most memorable? What aspects, if any, most closely relate to your own personal experiences?
6. How significant are childhood events in shaping our lives as adults? Which are most responsible for the person we become?
7. How important is point of view in this novel? Does the first-person point of view make the work more inclusive or exclusive to its audience? Would the work have as much of an impact if it were written from a different perspective?
8. Being a memoir and a personal account, how effective is the work in drawing the reader into Williams' family?
9. The novel is told from the perspective of a nine-year-old child. Do you think that maturity and personal growth affect Williams' interpretation of events in the novel? How significant are age and maturity to the way events are perceived versus the way they actually occur?
10. How important is personal reflection? Why and in what way?