A Retail Carol

by

Lee Vetter

It wasn’t the night they’d planned, but it turned out to be the night they needed.

A Retail Carol by Lee Vetter is an entertaining Christmas satire and an unexpected holiday treat; it is a story of desperation, connections, and redemption of random strangers brought together by time, place, and misdirected wants. The need they believed was critical for the perfect Christmas was the acquisition of the “IT” toy of the year – the Plastic-Thing-3000, but it turned out to be the need for human connection and understanding. 

The Westbrook Trading Company, with its aging edifice and barely on-the-edge relevancy, had miraculously held back a cache of what was to prove to be the “IT” toy of the holiday season that year and planned a stunning hourly raffle and midnight-hour final release of its stockpile for Christmas Eve. With the coveted Plastic-Thing-3000 having been sold out everywhere else for weeks, desperate parents crammed into the downtown store for a last-ditch effort at winning Christmas. Among the throng is a hopeful father of two and his single best friend for company; a worn-out single mother and her young daughter; a downtrodden husband, his clueless wife, and their bored teenage daughter; a local pastor with a secret past; the exhausted store employees; and the elderly store owner, who had concocted the last-minute holiday stand-off and hoop-jumping. Each customer goes to the store in hopes of scoring the prize of the season but comes away with something much more precious. 

The story is a novelization of a Christmas production and clearly conveys each scene and character encounter with precise, cinematic-quality images, humor, and touching emotional impact. The narrative unfolds from the multiple points of view of the main characters, and readers share in their thoughts and motivations for what is to come. While the story foreshadows and seems to promise that deserving characters will achieve their hearts’ desires this Christmas Eve, there are some truly unforeseen twists in the plot that will surprise, entertain, and warm the heart. I would have loved to have seen this performed on stage, and I know I will be sharing this book in the future. 

I recommend A RETAIL CAROL to readers of holiday stories. 

I voluntarily reviewed this after receiving an Advance Review Copy from Reedsy Discovery.