Many children wish that every day could be Christmas. For one year, Jim
Sutton and his family found themselves living that dream. As dreams go,
however, it turned out to be more of a nightmare. The Suttons were not
caught up in some kind of "Groundhog Day" scenario. Far from it. While
each day was distinct and separate, some days seemed to echo the one
before, like a rerun nobody asked to relive. From 1977 through early
1978, the Sutton clan lived as permanent residents in a year-round
Christmas attraction named, appropriately enough, Christmas Town.The
chain of events leading to how precisely they came to settle on an
island in the middle of Lake Champlain, Vermont is found in two words:
Bob Sutton (or as he was more colloquially called: Dad). Bob Sutton
pried his brood from their comfortable lives in Boston, Massachusetts to
relocate to the Green Mountain State. He bought a snack stand concession
in Christmas Town, where he believed they would make their fortunes in a
forever Winter Wonderland. None of the Suttons expected that this
outwardly idyllic setting would lead to familial betrayal and
tragedy.Twenty-two years later, a grown Jim Sutton ventures out to write
his novel. His muse: onion rings. The setting: the state he once swore
he would never visit again. In a rusted-out beater of a car, Jim
navigates his way through the countryside, sampling onion rings for his
book, The Onion Ring Lover's Guide to Vermont. When an accident strands
him in the sleepy town of Strawberry Falls, little does Jim know that
another dark family secret hides beneath the surface of this seemingly
idyllic little New England town, a secret that some of the town
residents would kill for to keep from coming to light.
