Christmas at Fontaine's

"The mind of the average New Yorker is never all that stable, given the pressures brought to bear on it. At Christmas, these pressures increase…"’Tis the night before Christmas and all through Fontaine’s department store in New York City, every creature is stirring...In Toys, misanthropic Mr. Muhlstock dreams of playthings which explode on contact, killing everyone in sight...A thoroughly nice young woman look­s for a comfortable person with whom to share her first Christmas alone...A spaced-out, far-out, burnt-out mad genius of a window decorator, who just can’t stop creating...In a grotto knee-deep in synthetic snow, a saintly Santa with an unsavory past wiggles his toes inside his too-tight boots and frantically years for the next bottle of hooch...And as Security Officer Locke hones in on would-be shoplifters like a 250lb linebacker demolishing a rookie quarterback, tyricannical old Louis Fontaine himself, for whom the meaning of Christmas lies only the bottom line, relentlessly prowls the aisles, silently urging the dollar bills out fo the shoppers’ pockets and into his tills...But most wonderfilly of all, a mysteri­ous presence begins to work its way in among the streamers and seasonal offers, a special kind of Christmas magic darting in and out of the lives of all of them—real as the silver suit it wears, hiding deep in the dark­ened stockrooms and empty stairwells, and flashing into being for only the briefest of moments,  a magic that cuts straight through the commercial razzmatazz until, for a brief moment, it turns the chaos of a department tore on Christmas Eve into a marvelous menagerie of miracles...Poignancy and whimsy, faith and delight, all combine in a fable of such enchanting in­spiration that it must be considered an in­stant classic, with Christmas at Fontaine’s, that master of magic William Kotzwinkle has surely created a contemporary successor to the much-loved Miracle on 34th Street."Delghtful and funny … Wherever Mr Kotzwinkle looks he manages to find something zany, at the same time, touching."–New York Times Book Review