Holiday Gift Guide: Read Before Opening

A quirky, wise, and inspiring guide to surviving the holidays, offered up without the predictable cheeseball. Twenty-four short essays journey deep into holiday terrain, shed light on finding life's best gifts in the most unexpected places, and provide a roadmap for the inevitable rough terrain. If ever the holiday hoopla and muck needed a guide to lead the way out, this book is it.

A quirky, wise, and inspiring guide to navigating the holidays, offered up in a unique mix of social commentary, humor, and personal insight, without the predictable cheeseball. Twenty-four short essays journey deep into holiday terrain, shed light on discovering life's best gifts in the most unexpected places, and provide a roadmap for the inevitable rough terrain. Brave revelations (Joy, Re-Gifted), a smattering of cold, hard truth (Sunny With a Chance of Whiteout), and the kindest of humor (Bog Lady), meet at the intersection of laugh and cry at the same time (Trees on Earth). If ever the hoopla and sticky muck of what the holidays have come to symbolize needed a guide to lead the way out, this book is it.

Mackenzie Rivers began her career as a whitewater river guide in the days before Title Nine and synthetic quick-dry fabrics. Her resume belongs in the Raises Eyebrows category: ski instructor, Grand Canyon river guide and trip leader, pastry chef, English teacher, ski town barista, guide for National Park archeology crew, law student, script reader, inn manager, farmer, landscape gardener, writer. When she was twelve she sold an entire set of Nancy Drews to fund her first getaway vehicle (a Schwinn Varsity five-speed bike); she drove a battery-less 1968 Land Rover for many years (she had to hand crank it), and rowed her 99th Grand Canyon river trip in the fifth month of her pregnancy. She has written about earthworms and Prada handbags in the same piece, and contrary to legend she did not attempt to guide the smallest boat commercially-used in Grand Canyon into the biggest hole of the biggest rapid in North America with six Welshmen singing at the tops of their lungs (they were singing but the rest was a mistake). Her writing has been published by Breakaway Books in the cycling anthology Bicycle Love. She lives in Oregon with her husband, son, and a vintage Mckenzie River driftboat. At night she dreams in river.