The Sleigh Elf's Daughter

About the Book

            Emily Louise Fairchild is a very special little six-year-old, as you can tell if you look closely at her name.  Clara Phillips, her teacher, will tell you that everyone in Emily’s first-grade class at Lakeport Central Elementary School is special too.  Like Justin Samuels, the class smarty-pants, in need of a good lesson in getting along that only Emily can provide.  Like bookworm Michael Bowman, who is just plain smart and unable through no fault of his own to make the friends every child needs in school.  Like shy Mariah Evans, with the dark spot on her childhood that she shares with her mother, both of them at-risk souls in need of Emily’s intervention.  Like Miriam Roseberg, who very soon will be going far away from all of her classmates.  And like Clara herself, who, until a snowy day not long before Christmas, almost lets the grasp with which the season has always held her heart slip away until she learned the truth about Emily on the next-to-last day before Winter Break. 

The young teacher was staring out her classroom window at the winter storm while just below her gaze, her world was beginning to change…

About the Author

By a family tradition of naming first-born sons after their fathers, I am fourth in a line of five Charleses (call me Michael), a newspaper correspondent and former radio newsman.  Before taking my advanced journalism degree at the University of Maryland (at the height of Watergate), I majored in physics at Wabash College in Indiana, where I began my broadcasting career at the commercial station on campus.  Four years in high school choir and over ten as a fine arts announcer have given my colleagues the understandable, but mistaken impression that I have a music degree.

More relevant to the present book, my first sustained effort in print, is the five years I have spent with as an all-purpose correspondent with a regional newspaper, producing around 400 stories, a year, at least a hundred of them reporting on the activities of elementary students who do everything from paint murals in homeless shelters to create their own original operas.  So don’t suppose this story contains much exaggeration. It shook loose one day during an interview with an elf girl dressed just as described for a school Christmas party.