"BUT Once a Year," is a book written for one class of people, and one class only for those in whose hearts lives the love of Christmas for its own sake. To those few who do not have this love, to those for whom the lighted shop windows decorated with holly and red ribbon hold no thrill, the pungent odor of the Christmas trees no memories, and the clear, sweet sound of the Christmas carols no dreams, these stories will mean little they will be merely well-written sentimentality.

Delicately sentimental like all of Miss Abbott's stories they are; gay little love stories strung upon the warm thread of the Christmas feeling, actually quite unlikely, yet fundamentally quite possible, just like fairy tales or Christmas itself. They tell of what never will happen, but what one feels might and ought to be.

Perhaps for many, eight of these stories at once will be a little too much, but there is no rule that you must read them all at a sitting. And if you have read one, you are more than likely to come back and read another provided you are the sort of person who ought to be reading them in the first place.