Everything you need to understand or teach This Year It Will Be Different by Maeve Binchy.
A theme that runs through all the stories in this collection is expressed most succinctly by Miss Hall in "Pulling Together": "I think Christmas is particularly hard, we have such high expectations, and it never lives up to them." The theme is most graphically demonstrated by Orla in "The Ten Snaps of Christmas" as she ruthlessly decides "to get a picture of Christmas the way it really is, not all people just posing...