A Carol Dickens Christmas
Sunday, December 21st at 1pm CT, and Thursday, December 25th at 1pm CT
It's Christmas, and Carol Dickens's life is in major transition.
Her son Finn, a talented trumpet player, is about to leave for college. Her ex-husband, a real-estate wheeler-dealer, wants to sell their properties in Kansas and move to Arizona. Her wheelchair-bound friend, Laurence, has fallen in love with her. To top it all off, Scraps, the family dog, is dying. As her world spins out of control, Carol seeks refuge in her research on the use of the semicolon--and in her ritual of cooking the perfect series of Victorian holiday meals inspired by A Christmas Carol.
About the author
Thomas Fox Averill is Professor Emeritus at Washburn University of Topeka, an O. Henry Award-winning short story writer, and an award-winning author of 10 novels. He is a collector of Kansas books and created the Thomas Fox Averill Kansas Studies Collection at Mabee Library. He is a gardener, bagpiper, and frequent visitor to the Pecos Wilderness in New Mexico.
His introduction to his latest collection What Kansas Means to Me: Twentieth Century Writers on the Sunflower State (1991) was titled “Afflicted with Affection,” and he remains so with the publication of Kansas Matters: Twenty-First-Century Writers on the Sunflower State (2025) edited by Averill and HPPR Radio Readers contributor Leslie VonHolten who writes about land and culture in the prairie and Great Plains regions.
In 2002, his Secrets of the Tsil Café was a finalist in the Literary Food Category of the International Association of Culinary Professionals. rode was named Outstanding Western Novel of 2011 as part of the Western Heritage Awards administered by the National Cowboy and Western Heritage Museum in Oklahoma City, and it was a Spur Finalist in the Western Novel category. A Carol Dickens Christmas won the Byron Caldwell Smith Award in 2015.
Tune into the two-hour broadcast at one of the two times it'll air during the 2025 holiday season:
Sunday, 12/21 @ 1pm CT
Thursday, 12/25 @ 1pm CT
