JJ Lee says he’s a “bit of a Charlie Brown.”
“There’s always a sense of loss or mournfulness when I engage with the season, not for any terribly tragic reason, but I’ve been trying to come to grips with that understanding,” he told Gloria Macarenko, the host of CBC’s On The Coast.
It’s a feeling he’d noticed in others, who’d shared their stories of painful, or sometimes comically bad, Christmases.
So, a storyteller by nature, Lee pitched the idea of an anthology of tragic Christmas lore to a book publisher.
“People send in really incredible, hard-to-believe stories that absolutely floor you and are extremely touching like you wouldn’t believe. They’re very moving stories.”
In 2023, he published Better Next Year. But the seemingly endless number of holiday horrors kept coming, so now, he’s published another.
Upon A Midnight Clear: More Christmas Epiphaniesis the second book of short, true stories edited by Lee, a former CBC Radio employee who …