It's beginning to look a lot like an American Christmas: irritable, unpleasant relatives; horrible weather, miserable travel; a slobbering dog--and one Jack Flanigan, "a harmless American of Irish origins," who is reluctantly but totally falling in love--with one Odessa Tatiana Alekseevna Shuskulya, a young woman from Russia who's studying at Harvard. (Jack, of course, is attending Boston College, the Jesuits' hangout in Chestnut Hill.)

One Tuesday, Jack picks her up in Harvard Square, showing off the Russian language he's been studying. It's not the urge to talk Russian that moves him, through; it's her spectacular, dark-eyed beauty. How is he to know that he's getting mixed up with a mystic who makes Alyosha Karamazov look like an earthbound nerd?

So, of course, he feels sorry for her, spending Christmas alone in a country not her own. He makes a big mistake: he invites her home to Chicago for the holiday, thought it isn't even Christmas in the Russian Orthodox calendar, and gorgeous Odessa is never alone except when she wants to be. So? So she accepts!

And what happens when she gets to Chicago, caught in the American maelstrom of commercialized Yuletide? Ah, now, that would be telling, wouldn't it? Enough to say, there's a tree, and a feast, and midnight Mass, and a gaggle of contentious Flanigans of all ages--who have the merriest Christmas ever--and nothing will ever again be quite the same for any of them.

Especially lucky Jack Flanigan.