Christmas glittering in silver and gold, Christmas on a shoestring, Christmas wrecked, Christmas salvaged, Christmas sentimental and Christmas sardonic, Christmas in city, country and village, in church and shopping mall and barn -- it's all here, in stories by the region's finest writers.Walter Learning's Christmas treat opens with an old-fashioned story, the first chapter of the novel version of Gordon Pinsent's TV show A Gift to Last. Antonine Maillet's "The Fine Christmas of Ti-Louis", a chapter from The Devil is Loose (Crache a Pic), goes back to an "olden days" Christmas, too -- a 1920s Acadian Christmas among the rum-runners. Harry Thurston finds "The Perfect Tree", first as a child and then as a father, and, in "Nutbeam's Christmas", Herb Curtis makes readers laugh and cry at the same time. M.T Dohaney's new story, "Mr. Eaton's, Only What I Ordered Please", looks as if it will end in tears, but never fear -- all turns out well in the end. Seasoned by Ray Guy's newspaper columns and JoeSherman's account of a Jewish child's Christmas in Cape Breton, Gifts to Last is warm-hearted but never sappy -- just like Walter himself.