The bestselling author launches the latest in her brilliant "knitting club" series —and supports a campaign to help the needy get hats.
The holidays are about reflection as much as celebration. My new novel, Knit the Season, is the third in The Friday Night Knitting Club series. This holiday book, about the healing power of memories, centers on a group of fictional women of different ages and backgrounds who've formed a lasting community of friendship. And yet writing their story, of course, put me in mind of my own family's holiday stories.Like many people, my grandparents were hard hit by the Depression: My grandfather was a mechanic and a car salesman who'd just had a shipment of shiny new vehicles delivered in 1929. After a few years of struggling, they sold everything to pay for a trip west; my grandfather found work in a garage. On Christmas Eve, the garage owner opened up the cash register and took out the entire contents: two $5 bills. He took one bill and generously gave the other to my grandfather, who gratefully walked home to let my grandmother know they could afford a Christmas meal. This had by no means been a sure thing. Together, my grandparents made their way quickly to town, with just enough left over to buy one gift each for my then-six-year-old father and his older sister. My dad received a toy race car. My aunt? A pair of knitting needles, a few skeins of yarn, and the promise of hours knitting next to my grandmother.
Knitting, then, is my family legacy, even if it took me until I was an adult to finally embrace it and learn how to knit. Every family has its artifacts, the pieces that explain who we are. What we have are the sweaters made by my grandmother's hands. She continued to knit out of love long after she needed to make clothes to keep her family warm. My late grandmother's spirit is all over The Friday Night Knitting Club series, especially in the character of Georgia Walker's beloved Gran in Scotland. She, like my Nanny, is a fabulous knitter and a very wise but opinionated lady, spry into her 90s. And in Knit the Season, Georgia's daughter Dakota returns to visit Gran and learn a few lessons about the richness of family bonds and the everlasting nature of a mother's love.
