December 12, 2026: The Christmas Locket, The Christmas Package, The Christmas Portrait, The Christmas Promise by Gini Athey (local author)

When Carol Nelson returns to snowy Wayland, Wisconsin, to settle her mother’s estate, she expects a quick visit—not a season of unraveling secrets, rediscovering home, and confronting the past she tried to outrun. With her two best friends unexpectedly moving in for the holidays and her childhood house suddenly overflowing with memories, Carol must navigate grief, friendship, and a mysterious box of her mother’s unfinished craft projects.

Can a failed promise open hearts and renew a family? Charlotte Wilson has always lived by the adage, promises made, promises fulfilled. As a successful defense lawyer, she’s in great demand and takes on many high-profile cases that send her all over the country. Now, a jury has found a defendant guilty because she missed a critical piece of evidence. With her world crashing around her—and a video clip of her running from the courthouse to prove it—Charlotte hurries to Willow Birch, Wisconsin, where her husband, a popular novelist, is with his ill mother. Her school-teacher daughter is there, too, with a surprise of her own. As the holidays approach, Charlotte confronts decisions that will change her marriage and her bond with her daughter and her mother-in-law in big ways. Maybe even for the better.

As a private duty nurse, Kari Smith has spent eight years traveling across the country from one assignment to the next. Following the sudden death of her mother, a well-known artist who cared more about her paintings than her children, Kari finds herself longing to return home. She must complete one final assignment before heading back to Maple Grove, Wisconsin, but Lester Worthington and his wife Bessie, who is in the final stages of heart failure, turn her life upside down in more ways than one.

Life has been nothing but a series of loss and change since Alice–Ali–Morgan lost her only daughter in a car accident four months ago. Now that she’s been awarded custody of her infant granddaughter, she heads home to Cedar Crest, a small town in Wisconsin, for a visit with her parents before starting a new job with Weston Academy while on her autumn term break.