John Grisham Wrote the Christmas Novel You Didn’t Know You Needed

One book about Christmas that you might have overlooked is a short novel that explores the idea of overlooking Christmas. Forgetting it. Renouncing it. Giving up on it for good. Not bothering anymore, social consequences be damned.

John Grisham, an author known for legal thrillers including A Time to Kill (1989) and The Firm (1991), both of which became hugely popular films, tried his hand at something a bit different in the early days of the current millennium. He went far outside his comfort zone, and you don’t have to be a fan of the courtroom potboilers to appreciate the result.

If you enjoy Fargo-style Middle American weirdness, satire, and dark humor, then Grisham’s 2001 novel Skipping Christmas may pique your interest. It is the story of Luther Krank, a prim accountant who lives and works in an unnamed suburb and who rises to Dostoyevskian levels of anguish and alienation as the story churns on.

Luther shares a home on Hemlock Street with his wife Nora and their young daughter, Blair. The neighborhood is a picture of sedateness, and the street has won awards over the years for the quality of the snowmen that people put up on their roofs, in one of many wintertime rituals so common that no one ever thinks to question them. The respect that people in this town enjoy is inversely proportionate to any individuality they dare assert.

Now the holidays have arrived again. But as an accountant, Luther takes a keen interest in where large and small amounts of money end up, how they got there, and the nature of any expenditures that might strain the finances of a family or a community. With a bit of math, he determines that his household spent $6,100 at Christmas the year before, on decorations, parties, a tree, and, of course, presents.

For an accountant, an expenditure of that kind must justify itself. Luther cannot help thinking of other uses for such a fortune. The sum is more than enough to do something nice with Nora for the first time in a while, like take a Caribbean cruise, Luther decides. That experience is within their grasp if they can just choose to do what, for others on Hemlock Street, would be unthinkable: not buy a tree or a snowman, host parties, or get tons of gifts for relatives near and far. In short, they must choose not to “do Christmas,” which in their community will brand them with a figurative “A.” It will not stand for adultery, as in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, but rather for “atheist,” “agnostic,” or — what would really be unthinkable in a world of malls and Best Buys — “ascetic.”

The ostracism that Luther incurs by choosing to skip Christmas is swift and severe. Others cannot fathom his decision not to buy a tree or go around picking up gifts for loved ones. For his part, Luther tries hard to fill his mind with images of the Caribbean settings he will soon get to take in with his wife, but the disapproval of others in the insular suburb clearly rankles. Everyone knows everyone. No one’s life is a secret. People expect you to spend a lot of money at Christmas, so you go with the flow and don’t bother with cui bono?

Luther does not like the bullying from the town, but he lacks the character and resolve to be a committed, articulate rebel. The closing chapters of the book show how Luther deals with the fallout from his actions, as well as how his behavior towards Blair’s Peruvian adventures comes back to haunt him in his suburb. Joe Roth’s Christmas With the Kranks was a less-than-successful star-studded (Tim Allen , Jamie Lee Curtis , Dan Aykroyd , M. Emmet Walsh) attempt to bring this to the big screen.

There is more to the Grisham oeuvre than courtroom potboilers. Skipping Christmas toys with ideas far weightier and more seditious than readers would expect to find in the work of an author known for meeting highly commercial criteria in book after book. It is briskly written, skillfully paced, and full of sly observations introduced in an offhand way.

In a crowning irony, the Vintage paperback edition of this critique of unthinking consumerism and last-minute impulse purchases is compact enough to make — you guessed it — the perfect stocking stuffer.