Every year we pick a very vaguely Christmas-related theme for our annual anthology. Then we invite our writers to subvert it. In this collection, they've certainly done that to the extent that we almost had a picture of cream crackers for the cover. Our theme this year is "crackers". So, we have Christmas crackers, cream crackers, cracking dresses, a cracked antique and many, many other interpretations. We hope you will find this a cracking good read. Some fantastic writing was offered and the most of it was potentially publishable. We chose the pieces in this collection because they told a good story, had a strong voice and were imaginative in their interpretation of the theme. This anthology of literary fiction is so apt for the 21st Century.