"Happy families are all alike," said Tolstoy, and the O'Malley's are one of the happiest, if slightly crazy, families in current fiction. A Christmas Wedding continues the saga of Chucky, the youngest son who wants to live the quiet life of an accountant and raise a nice Catholic family. Fate, of course, has other plans for Chucky, in the person of the beautiful Rosemarie, his off-again on-again nemesis from the time he saved her life when he was a young man.

Thrown out of Notre Dame on trumped up charges, Chucky ends up going to the University of Chicago. The only problem: his lifelong enemy Rosemarie is a fellow student. They decide to be "just friends," and while they battle with each other, "just friends" turns into something neither of them expected.