Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe

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Including five new, never before published Christmas stories and the classic “Dave Cooks the Turkey,” this special collection from the Vinyl Cafe is Stuart McLean at his finest.

Christmas has always been a special time at the Vinyl Cafe. For two decades, Stuart McLean travelled across the country every December with The Vinyl Cafe Christmas tour, bringing the gift of laughter and light during the darkest days of the year. The hilarious world of Dave and Morley was even more real–more vibrant–during the holidays. For many, the Vinyl Cafe Christmas stories became beloved family traditions. From mishaps with the Turlingtons and the tale of a young Dave’s first holiday disaster to the surprising “Christmas Ferret” and the touching sign-off in “The Christmas Card,” these wonderful new stories will delight for years to come.    

Brimming with charm and humour (often at Dave’s expense), these twelve stories entertain on every page, reminding us what the holidays are all about.A National Bestseller

“For fans of the Vinyl Cafe, Christmas was the most wonderful time of the year…[Stuart’s] yuletide joy lives on in this new book…” - Hello! Canada, November 2017

“The Vinyl Cafe has been an unofficial national pastime since 1994…best read with a cup of cocoa in hand.” – Canadian Living, December 2017

“As funny as it is heartwarming, this book is the Vinyl Cafe at its best.” – CBC NewsSTUART McLEAN was the writer and host of the popular CBC Radio show The Vinyl Cafe. He is the author of the bestselling books Vinyl Cafe Diaries, which won the short fiction award from the Canadian Authors Association; The Morningside World of Stuart McLean, which was a finalist for the City of Toronto Book Awards; Welcome Home: Travels in Smalltown Canada, which won the CAA’s award for nonfiction; and Home from the Vinyl Cafe, Vinyl Cafe Unplugged, and Secrets from the Vinyl Cafe, all three of which won the Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour. He received the Canadian Booksellers Association Lifetime Achievement Award in 2014. He passed away on February 15, 2017.Most families who celebrate Christmas have traditions at this time of year. Traditions that bring warmth and light to the cold, dark days of December.

The smell of the fir tree when you walk into the house.

The crackle of the fire.

Eggnog and mulled wine.

A mountain of presents under the tree.

Or that moment on Christmas Eve, just before bed, when everyone is asleep except you. The house is dark, but for the glow of the lights on the tree. And you sit there, in the halo, and finish your cup of tea (or, okay, your Scotch) and enjoy one peaceful moment before the madness of the morning ahead.

Even families that don’t celebrate Christmas often have Christmas traditions: Chinese food on Christmas Eve, going to the movies on Christmas Day, or heading south to avoid the entire thing altogether.

Most of us mark the season in some fashion or another.

It was no different for Stuart and our little Vinyl Cafe family. For years, for decades, we celebrated the season inour own merry way. But it wasn’t always like that.

It started the year Dave cooked the family turkey. Or,more to the point, when he didn’t.

That was the very first Vinyl Cafe Christmas story,and the story that turned Christmas into a deal for ushere at the Vinyl Cafe.

After that first performance of “Dave Cooks the Turkey” in 1996, we realized that Butch, in his quirky Grade B way, had changed the Vinyl Cafe landscape. The reaction was so intense it had to be followed with another Christmas story. So, every year, around October, Stuart would begin to imagine how Dave and his family might tackle the holidays, always mindful that every scenario would be measured against the turkey.

Over the years, the turkey story became like a snowball rolling down a snow-covered hill. It just kept getting. . . bigger. People wrote to tell us that the story had become one of their Christmas traditions. Some spent Christmas Eve sitting together as a family, listening to the turkey story on CD. Some read it out loud as part of their holiday celebration. Others felt the season didn’t start until they heard Stuart read it on the radio.

As the turkey story became one of your traditions, you became one of our Christmas traditions. Slowly, over the next twenty-one years, our annual Christmas concert grew from just one Christmas show at Glenn Gould Studio at the CBC in Toronto to a thirty-six-show national tour.

We loved that tour. The Christmas concerts felt like a family reunion. Stuart used to say it was more like sitting around a living room than an auditorium.

We would spend five weeks chugging around the country, crammed into a tour bus with a wonderful extended family: musicians, lighting and sound engineers, editors, producers, tour managers, and bus drivers. Then, in every city and town, we’d gather with not only the people on the bus and the people who worked on the radio show but also their families. And the audience. Over the years, many of you made our Christmas concert one of your family traditions. We started to recognize your faces out in the lobby. We got to know you, and you got to know us.

Like so many things at this time of year, the Christmas tour had a magical quality. We’d often walk back to the hotel after the concert, the celebratory feeling of the show hanging around like our warm breath in the cold air.

At the hotel, we’d gather at the bar and rehash our favourite moments from the show: the hambone kid who joined Stuart on stage, the singalong finale, the surprising laugh in the story that we hadn’t been expecting. Each show felt familiar, but also exciting and new. Kind of like Christmas: a mix of tradition and surprise.

More than once, as we were leaving town, we’d snake our forty-foot tour bus through a residential neighbourhood because we’d heard they had “good lights.” One night, outside of Owen Sound, we came across a stretch of highway where the houses were so beautifully lit upwe asked Brad, our driver, to wrestle the tour bus to theside of the road so we could sit there, in the quiet glow.

There is something about this season that brings people together. We were lucky that it brought us together with each other, and with you, for so many happy years.

It has been over two decades since that first year that Dave cooked the turkey. When we look back now, it’s clear that our entire year revolved around Christmas.

Like Morley’s locomotive, the VC express was always headed straight to Christmas. That is why we are so pleased to have a little book entirely dedicated to the yuletide adventures of Dave, Morley, Stephanie, and Sam.US

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