Laura and Elliott are celebrating their 14th anniversary when a terrible headache strikes Laura while their car is stuck in Boston's Sumner tunnel. Within hours, it becomes clear that Laura will not survive the rupture of a major blood vessel in her brain, and she must choose how she will spend her last hours on earth. She chooses to do that not bemoaning her fate, but gathering around her those she loves — her three young daughters, her husband and her siblings — so that she can tell them not what she feels, but what she sees in each of them, giving each a legacy to which they can cling after Laura is gone. Part tragedy, but part hopeful story of the survival of the spirit, perhaps even beyond death, Christmas, Present is a story for any season, and caused me to ask myself, while writing it, what parts of my own life were the things that matter most, the gifts I had been given and could give.