THE GIRLS AND IFLEW home that same day, arriving in Salt Lake City around 7P.M. My brother-in-law, Wally, who works for Delta Airlines, met us at the airport and took the girls home while I drove off to a speaking event I had promised to do for my publicist. I suppose I was a bit distracted by the day’s events, as it had snowed all day in Utah and the freeway looked more like tundra than asphalt. And I was driving as if I hadn’t noticed.
Coming around a bend in the freeway I turned the wheel only to find that my car did not respond. I glanced down at the speedometer. I was traveling nearly sixty miles per hour, completely out of control. The car maintained for a few hundred feet, then it began to slide sideways off the road. My first thought was that I was glad the girls were not with me. Then I thought, How strange that I would have two surreal experiences in one day. A Today show appearance in the morning and death at night.
My car went over the side of the highway, missing several light posts and plowing into a high bank of snow, burying my car in the powder. I must have created a tremendous flume of white, as within moments another motorist pulled over to help me. I walked from the accident without a scratch, grateful to be safe, and angry at my carelessness. It was the first time I had missed a speaking engagement.
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The next morning I called my distributor. Their phones and fax machine had not stopped since my television appearance, and by the time they arrived at work that morning a pile of fax orders had collected on the ground. The orders and reorders for my book were already in the tens of thousands, and that week Publishers Distribution Center shipped out an additional seventy thousand copies.
I later learned from bookstore managers that the morning of our Today show appearance, people lined up outside bookstores all across America to buy my book.
As in the year before, demand for The Christmas Box continued to increase. My distributor had to hire extra employees to assist in shipping.
The Wednesday before Christmas I was in a shopping mall parking terrace when I received a phone call from my secretary, Heather. “Some man just called,” she said. “I think he said he was from Dell Publishing. Some big publishing house. He said that the New York Times advance report just came out and he wanted to congratulate you because The Christmas Box just hit the New York Times bestseller list.”
Despite the fact that The Christmas Box was in less than one out of five bookstores in America, one week after the phone call it debuted at number two on the New York Times paperback bestseller list.
