“Good Tidings” is a rather small book, but it still needs a lot of filler: recipes, including one for smoked salmon spread, and family anecdotes. (When Bristol announced she was pregnant, Sarah initially wanted to make her get married, but Todd said no.) Then there was the year Granddad was taken off to the hospital for what everybody feared was a heart attack, but it turned out to be salmon poisoning.

As the teenaged Sarah Heath, Palin spent one Christmas hoping to get a mini-tape recorder. Her parents forced her to wait until the very end to unwrap her big present, which, she discovered while the rest of the family watched and chortled, was actually a dictionary. The moral, as Palin tells it, is that her parents wanted her to know that “words matter.” It sounds to me as though there was a mean streak in the Heath clan, which perhaps explains a lot.

Led by the American Family Association and Fox News’s Bill O’Reilly, conservative Christians have been encouraging boycotts of stores that do not directly connect their aim to sell massive amounts of clothes, toys, electronics and linens over the month of December with the birth of Christ. In her book, Palin recounts the sins and redemption of Walmart, which also gives her a chance to mention that, in 2003, the chain gave its Wasilla outlet a special award for selling 325 miles of duct tape, which averaged out to 314 feet per resident. It’s the kind of detail I appreciate.

This year, the American Family Association has been declaring war on Radio Shack for an alleged failure to mention Christmas enough, and celebrating a victory over Gap Inc. (“Complete turnaround!”) A spokeswoman for Gap said in a phone interview that the company instructs its staff to cry “Merry Christmas!” and “Happy Hanukkah!” and “Joyous Kwanzaa!” to customers, which seems like a lot of effort at an already stressful time of the year. She also volunteered that the company’s Old Navy brand ran TV ads last year “featuring the Griswold family from National Lampoon’s ‘Christmas Vacation.’ ”

So, more mentions of the birth of the Savior while promoting sweaters for the whole family.

We’d be a slightly happier nation if we could just feel good about the ways that Americans make this swell-but-stressful season work. Palin brags about her role as Christmas Warrior when she was mayor of Wasilla. “I knew I’d be criticized and challenged for sanctioning the Nativity scene. ... But I didn’t care,” she writes. This was perhaps, in part, because there actually appeared to be no criticism or challenge whatsoever.