‘Maria’s’ Christmas Tale on Readers’ Hit Parade : Theodore Taylor’s novella about a Nativity scene on a flat-bed float has generated interest in a fictional town.

“Years and years ago,” Laguna Beach author Theodore Taylor recalls, he was up in the San Joaquin Valley watching a Christmas parade down the main street of a small farm town.

Sandwiched between a glitzy float sponsored by the Bank of America and an equally expensive one by an automobile dealership, Taylor says, a “puffing” diesel tractor was pulling a flat-bed float bearing a Nativity scene with a Mexican-American couple, “the oldest Mary and Joseph I’d seen in my life.”

Unlike the lavish floats, which cost thousands of dollars, Taylor says the flat-bed float couldn’t have cost more than $5.

“I thought to myself, if there’s a trophy awarded for best float it should go to the Mexican-Americans on the flat-bed,” Taylor says. “It was a very touching scene.”

This memory of “the humble sweeping aside the grand” provided the inspiration for Taylor’s new book, “Maria: A Christmas Story.” (Harcourt Brace Jovanovich; $13.95), an 84-page novella that is, in the author’s words, a “Christmas fable for all ages.”

Taylor, an award-winning writer of adult and young adult novels, wrote “Maria” last year, converting the older Mexican-American couple he witnessed on the float years ago into a young Latino brother and sister.

Set in the San Joaquin Valley farm community of San Lazaro sometime in the early ‘60s, the novella tells the story of Maria, the 11-year-old daughter of a poor vegetable farmer.

As the book opens, the town’s annual Christmas parade is fast-approaching and Maria is once again feeling envious as she listens to her friends--the daughters of wealthy ranchers--describe the expensive floats their families are paying big bucks to have designed.

As Taylor writes, “No Latinos in San Lazaro had that kind of money to spend on a parada. “ A few Latinos rode horses in the parade, but as far as Maria’s father was concerned “it was a total parada gringa. Not a drop of Spanish or Indian blood was in the veins of those sitting on the floats.”

Which makes Maria’s sudden declaration that her family will be entering the parade this year all the more surprising to her wealthy girlfriends--not to mention her own family when they find out what she’s done.

As might be expected, the story’s ending provides a valuable reminder of the true spirit of Christmas.

The slim book, which Taylor has been promoting on a recent publicity tour, is striking a chord with readers.

“I’ve had calls from all over the state, librarians and people saying they want to go to San Lazaro on that first Saturday in December,” Taylor says. “Well, San Lazaro doesn’t exist. It’s fictional.”

Taylor says he had been kicking his Christmas story idea around for years until “I finally decided last year to go ahead and do it.” Most of his ideas for novels have a long gestation period, he says. He got the idea for “The Cay,” his award-winning young adult novel about a young boy who is forced to confront his racial prejudices, in 1956 but didn’t write it until 11 years later.

“I sort of hang onto these things and do it when I think it’s the right time to do it,” he says Taylor, whose next book, a suspense-adventure novel for adults called “To Kill the Leopard” is due out in June.

Meantime, Taylor says his agent is “shopping” “Maria: A Christmas Story” for television. Because of its short length, “it’s not a movie, but it could be a TV thing,” he says, adding that short books are actually tougher to write.

“It’s the long ones that are easy because you get a lot of space,” he says. “It’s much easier to do a book that’s 300 pages than a book of 79 or 80.”

Taylor will sign copies of “Maria” at 4 p.m. Sunday at Upchurch-Brown Booksellers, 384 Forest Ave., Laguna Beach.