Christmas Quotes: Bringing Hope

 This passage comes from The Christmas Secret by Karen Swan and comes after a particularly hard event for the characters. This author produces two books a year, one in summer and the other in winter and more than one have a Christmas setting. This one is set in Scotland.

And when the three-metre Christmas tree, which had been ordered a month previously, arrived that afternoon when the embers were still smoking, she had been part of the team hoisting it into position in the nearside corner of the courtyard, just inside the gates.

"Isn't it trivial - disrespectful - to erect something as frivolous as this in the immediate aftermath of what could have been an unspeakable tragedy?" Torquil had asked her in his usual earnest voice.

"People need hope and reassurance during the darkest hours, not the brightest," she'd replied.

And she'd been right. As the tree was being erected, the ladies in the canteen had brewed up some hot toddies and scones, someone put on a playlist of carols and as the sun had set on their first day "back-in" and they had switched on the lights, a cheer had gone up, the tree suddenly totemic of the community's resilience.