Home for the Holidays by Dawn Colclasure

Mona Townsend was five years old when her mother tried to kill her father.

This crime cost her and her brother, Colton, 23, twenty years with their mother.

Finally reunited on one December morning, the siblings are willing to forgive all and create a fresh start with their mother.

With Christmas coming up, Mona wants to make the occasion extra special.

Knowing that her mother has had a long-term rift with her own mother, she and her brother hatch a plan: Why not surprise their mother with a family reunion so that the two women can bury the hatchet and have a relationship again? After all, if she was capable of forgiving her mother for the past, why wouldn’t her own mother want to set things right with her mother too?

It was Christmas, after all. A time for miracles and family.

But what Mona and Colton don’t know is that their mother had a very good reason for severing ties with her own mother, and that some families are too toxic to appreciate the holiday spirit.