FRANKLIN, Tenn. (BP) – Donna VanLiere tells the sentimental Christmas stories mass audiences enjoy, beginning with her debut “The Christmas Shoes,” which drew a record 16.7 million viewers to its 2002 release as a CBS movie.
Based on Newsong’s chart-topping release by the same name, VanLiere said she began writing the story when the song was just a premise. Before writing the song, NewSong founders asked her opinion of a couple of sentences about a little boy struggling to buy his dying mama a pair of dancing shoes to wear to heaven.
“Do you think they’d make a good song?” NewSong had asked VanLiere of the sentences, she told Baptist Press decades later. “I said, well, you know, I actually think they’d make a good book. And that turned into The Christmas Shoes. So that was the beginning of that. And then it just kind of snowballed from there.”
The movie adaptation drew the largest audience of any CBS original movie in 2002-2003, placing it among the top movies that season.
Her sequels “The Christmas Blessing” and “The Christmas Hope” followed, along with “The Christmas Secret,” “The Christmas Note” and “Christmas Town,” all fictional accounts and made-for-TV movies inspired by VanLiere’s love of Christmas and its namesake Jesus Christ.
“And so I kept writing the Christmas novels in addition to other things, but really wanted to even go deeper this year,” she said, “which is why I wrote “Looking for Christmas: A Search for Joy and Hope of a Nativity.”
The New York Times and USA Today bestselling author’s latest work among more than a dozen novels is reminiscent of what she discovered was her very first essay on God’s greatest gift.
“For any Christian, really, Christmas is every day. It’s not just one day. It is something that we carry in our heart every single day,” she said. “So when it came time to writing a story about it, the first Christmas story I wrote was actually, I discovered it just a week ago.”
Clearing the home of her late mother Alice Payne, who died in October, VanLiere found a newspaper clipping her mother had stored. It was an editorial VanLiere had written for the “Medinamite,” the Medina High School student newspaper.
“I wrote about the true meaning of Christmas, about Jesus and His birth,” she said. “And I don’t remember writing it, but there it was. And I actually thought, I bet there isn’t a public school today that would allow that. But that was back in 1985 in Northeast Ohio.”
Her 2025 release and latest Christmas book takes readers to the nativity, exploring its meaning and purpose, and applying its healing balm to struggles humanity has suffered for centuries.
“I wanted to take people into the truth of Scripture, into why did Jesus come, the time that Jesus came, the people involved,” she said of the book. “All of the people involved, they were simple, ordinary people. Some of them were outcasts of society, like the shepherds. They couldn’t even testify in court. That’s how far down they were on the social ladder.”
VanLiere’s narrative incorporates Jesus’ concern for the downtrodden and His mission to seek and save the lost.
“He came for those who drink too much, smoke like chimneys, inhale from a crack pipe, sell their bodies, or are addicted to online shopping, power, status, cosmetic procedures, work, exercise, money, or food,” she writes. “He came for those who find their happiness in a pill bottle, for those who gamble away everything, and for those who hide a burner phone from their spouse. He came for the depressed, the lonely, the anxious, the stressed, the hopeless, and the discouraged.”
Her inclusion is extensive.
“So I really wanted to bring all these people to the forefront so that the reader could say, ‘That’s me. I’m just like that person. Jesus came for me,’” VanLiere said. “He came for the outsider. He came for the outcast. He came for the person who’s in the margins. And so I just really wanted to bring it all to life.”
While it’s not a novel, VanLiere tells the stories of those crucial to the story, including Mary and Joseph, Zechariah and Elizabeth, the Magi, shepherds and others.
“That dark, smelly nativity scene filled with the stink and noise of animals is not a place to look down on or be pitied, but rather, it was the beginning of hope for us all,” VanLiere writes. “Grace was born there. Peace penetrated our hopelessness there. Love shone bright in our darkness there. That is our comfort and joy.”
Looking for Christmas, from Harper Press, and VanLiere’s companion podcast are available here.
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