- Mark Teppo Acknowledgements Once, I wrote a story for my mother for Christmas, and she recently found it and sent me a PDF. Thanks, Mom, for hanging on to such ephemera. A later version of that story sold to Pulphouse Publishing in the early 1990s, but was orphaned shortly thereafter. It was picked up again for an anthology called Buried Treasures, a collection of neglected and lost stories. My thanks to Dean Wesley Smith and Jerry Oltion for getting me started. The later parts of this quartet of Christmas stories were extremely wordy Christmas "cards" I gave to fifty or so of my closest friends during the waning years of the last millennium. There was talk of putting them together as a novel, but little came of that in those days. Cecil Beatty-Yasutake, though, never let a year go by without reminding me that I should get this book out. Here it is, sir. Better late than never. Thank you for your unflagging enthusiasm. The interstitial season was written especially for this edition.
