by Amy Newmark
Amy is credited with revitalizing the Chicken Soup for the Soul brand, which has been a publishing industry phenomenon since the first book came out in 1993. By compiling inspirational and aspirational true stories curated from ordinary people who have had extraordinary experiences, Amy has kept the twenty-three-year-old Chicken Soup for the Soul brand fresh and relevant.
Amy graduated magna cum laude from Harvard University where she majored in Portuguese and minored in French. She then embarked on a three-decade career as a Wall Street analyst, a hedge fund manager, and a corporate executive in the technology field. She is a Chartered Financial Analyst.
Her return to literary pursuits was inevitable, as her honors thesis in college involved traveling throughout Brazil’s impoverished northeast region, collecting stories from regular people. She is delighted to have come full circle in her writing career — from collecting stories “from the people” in Brazil as a twenty-year-old to, three decades later, collecting stories “from the people” for Chicken Soup for the Soul.
When Amy and her husband Bill, the CEO of Chicken Soup for the Soul, are not working, they are visiting their four grown children.
Follow Amy on Twitter @amynewmark. Listen to her free daily podcast, The Chicken Soup for the Soul Podcast, at www.chickensoup.podbean.com, or find it on iTunes, the Podcasts app on iPhone, or on your favorite podcast app on other devices.
Thank You
We are grateful to all our story contributors and fans, who shared thousands of stories about the joy of Christmas in their lives. We loved reading all the submissions and choosing the 101 that would appear in the book. If felt like Christmas in July around here.
We owe special thanks to Barbara LoMonaco and Mary Fisher, who read all the submissions. They narrowed down the list of finalists for D’ette and Amy to make some hard choices. As always, we had way more great stories than would fit in this volume, and many of them will end up appearing in future Chicken Soup for the Soul titles.
Associate Publisher D’ette Corona continued to be Amy’s right-hand woman in creating the final manuscript and working with all our wonderful writers. Barbara LoMonaco and Kristiana Pastir, along with outside proofreader Elaine Kimbler, jumped in at the end to proof, proof, proof. And yes, there will always be typos anyway, so feel free to let us know about them at [email protected].
The whole publishing team deserves a hand, including editor Ronelle Frankel, Senior Director of Production Victor Cataldo, and graphic designer Daniel Zaccari, who turned our manuscript into this beautiful book.
Sharing Happiness, Inspiration, and Wellness
Real people sharing real stories, every day, all over the world. In 2007, USA Today named Chicken Soup for the Soul one of the five most memorable books in the last quarter-century. With over 100 million books sold to date in the U.S. and Canada alone, more than 200 titles in print, and translations into more than forty languages, “chicken soup for the soul” is one of the world’s best-known phrases.
Today, twenty-three years after we first began sharing happiness, inspiration and wellness through our books, we continue to delight our readers with new titles, but have also evolved beyond the bookstore, with super premium pet food, a line of high quality soups, and a variety of licensed products and digital offerings, all inspired by stories. Chicken Soup for the Soul has recently expanded into visual storytelling through movies and television. Chicken Soup for the Soul is “changing the world one story at a time®.” Thanks for reading!
Share with Us
We all have had Chicken Soup for the Soul moments in our lives. If you would like to share your story or poem with millions of people around the world, go to chickensoup.com and click on “Submit Your Story.” You may be able to help another reader and become a published author at the same time. Some of our past contributors have launched writing and speaking careers from the publication of their stories in our books!
We only accept story submissions via our website. They are no longer accepted via mail or fax.
To contact us regarding other matters, please send us an e-mail through [email protected], or fax or write us at:
Chicken Soup for the Soul
P.O. Box 700
Cos Cob, CT 06807-0700
Fax: 203-861-7194
One more note from your friends at Chicken Soup for the Soul: Occasionally, we receive an unsolicited book manuscript from one of our readers, and we would like to respectfully inform you that we do not accept unsolicited manuscripts and we must discard the ones that appear.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: The Joy of Christmas
101 Holiday Tales of Inspiration, Love and Wonder
Amy Newmark. Foreword by Mrs. Nicholas Claus
Published by Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC www.chickensoup.com
Copyright ©2016 by Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC. All Rights Reserved.
No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the written permission of the publisher.
CSS, Chicken Soup for the Soul, and its Logo and Marks are trademarks of Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC.
The publisher gratefully acknowledges the many publishers and individuals who granted Chicken Soup for the Soul permission to reprint the cited material.
Front cover, back cover and interior illustrations courtesy of iStockphoto.com/nokee (©nokee)
Back cover illustration of Mrs. Nicholas Claus courtesy of iStockphoto.com/AnjaRabenstein (©Anja Rabenstein)
Photo of Amy Newmark courtesy of Susan Morrow at SwickPix
Cover and Interior by Daniel Zaccari
Distributed to the booktrade by Simon & Schuster. SAN: 200-2442
Publisher’s Cataloging-In-Publication Data
(Prepared by The Donohue Group, Inc.)
Names: Newmark, Amy, compiler. | Claus, Nicholas, Mrs., writer of supplementary textual content.
Title: Chicken soup for the soul : the joy of Christmas : 101 holiday tales of inspiration, love and wonder / [compiled by] Amy Newmark ; foreword by Mrs. Nicholas Claus.
Other Titles: Joy of Christmas : 101 holiday tales of inspiration, love and wonder
Description: [Cos Cob, Connecticut] : Chicken Soup for the Soul, LLC [2016]
Identifiers: LCCN 2016949005 | ISBN 978-1-61159-963-3 (print) | ISBN 978-1-61159-262-7 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Christmas--Literary collections. | Christmas--Anecdotes. | Hanukkah--Literary collections. | Hanukkah--Anecdotes. LCGFT: Anecdotes.
Classification: LCC GT4985 .C45 2016 | LCC GT4985 (ebook) | DDC 394.2663/02--dc23