Présentation de l'éditeur
The intrepid women of The Hot Flash Club are back for the holidays, soothing jingled nerves and stressed shoppers in their exclusive spa and celebrating the joys of the season. In her witty and delightfully wisecracking prose, Nancy Thayer tells a heartwarming tale packed with fun, secrets, romance–and an ample dose of good cheer.
When the Hot Flash friends gather at the spa to trim the Christmas tree, they share steaming mugs of hot chocolate, a few laughs, and a vow to make this holiday one to remember. And it is–but not in the cheerful, ho-ho-ho way they expected. Instead, Christmas brings family conflicts, household accidents, plane delays–and that’s just the beginning.
After a hazardous holiday season, the women make resolutions that they intend to keep . . . in a perfect world. But life–and their friends and relatives–cause complications. Shirley lends financial support to her boyfriend’s schemes, which infuriates Alice, whose own son commits an act she’s not sure she can accept. Marilyn travels to Scotland and falls in love, but her octogenarian mother needs her at home. And when Polly and Faye find themselves pitted against each other by a younger woman, an they overcome this clash to make a new, entrepreneurial dream come true? Then real disaster strikes, bringing new challenges and surprising revelations.
Just as every month of the year throws new problems at us all, so too does the end of the year give us the chance to reunite and put these problems
into their proper perspective. And when the Hot Flash Five get together for the holidays, we should expect nothing less than the unexpected.
Extrait
On this early December day, snowflakes sparkled down to earth like granted wishes from a magic wand.
Inside the handsome lounge of The Haven, Yule logs blazed cheerfully in the fireplace, while Presley, Sinatra, and Springsteen sang Christmas carols. Near the long casement windows, five women were looping lights around a Norway spruce so tall they had to use a ladder to reach the highest branches.
“Okay, that’s the end of the last string,” Marilyn called from behind the fat tree.
“Plug them in,” Shirley told her.
Marilyn knelt to fit the plug into the socket.
“Oooooooh!” Shirley, Faye, Alice, Marilyn, and Polly sighed with delight as dozens and dozens of multicolored miniature lights twinkled to life.
“Now,” Shirley announced, “for the fun part. How shall we do this?” Shirley was the director of The Haven, but the four other women were her best friends, practically her family, and she wanted to please everyone.
“I think we should all hang the ornaments we brought where we want,” Polly suggested.
“But keep in mind,” Faye added, “it will look better if the heaviest, biggest ornaments go on the bottom boughs, with the smaller ones on the higher branches.” She was an artist, with an artist’s eye.
“Yes, but we don’t want it to look too perfect,” Alice insisted. “We want it to look real.”
“Good point, Alice,” Shirley agreed. “Perfection, as we all know, isn’t real.”
“Sometimes it is,” Marilyn disagreed, in her thoughtful, vague way. “The horseshoe crab, genus Limulus, for example, is perfect. Its design hasn’t changed since the Triassic period, that’s two hundred forty-five million years.”
“Lovely,” Faye said gently, amused. “Still, we really don’t want to hang a horseshoe crab on the Christmas tree.”
“I suppose not. Although one year we did.” Marilyn smiled at the memory. She was a paleobiologist—the others teasingly called her a pale old biologist—and her grown son and her ex-husband were molecular geneticists. “Teddy was nine, and fascinated with crustaceans and fossils, so we bored holes in lots of shells, slipped colored cords through, and hung the tree with crabs, mollusks, and gastropods.”
Alice snorted with laughter. “You are so weird!”
“Oh, I don’t know,” Polly chimed in. “David told me that he and Amy are hanging only homemade decorations on their tree. And
