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Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl (Alternating Currents, 1956) is, partially, an “if this goes one” satire about the commercialisation of Christmas, and begins with the story’s narrator, Mr Martin, recruiting a young woman called Lilymary Hargreave for his department at Heinemann’s store. Her job is to gift-wrap and label shoppers’ Christmas purchases, and it’s here where we get the first dose of satire (apart an earlier mention that this Christmas rush is happening in early September):

[Lilymary] called me over near closing time. She looked distressed and with some reason. There was a dolly filled with gift-wrapped packages, and a man from Shipping looking annoyed. She said, “I’m sorry, Mr. Martin, but I seem to have done something wrong.”
The Shipping man snorted. “Look for yourself, Mr. Martin,” he said, handing me one of the packages.
I looked. It was wrong, all right. Heinemann’s new wrinkle that year was a special attached gift card—a simple Yule scene and the printed message:

The very Merriest of Season’s Greetings
From …………………………………
To ……………………………………
$8.50

The price varied with the item, of course. Heinemann’s idea was for the customer to fill it out and mail it, ahead of time, to the person it was intended for. That way, the person who got it would know just about how much he ought to spend on a present for the first person. It was smart, I admit, and maybe the smartest thing about it was rounding the price off to the nearest fifty cents instead of giving it exactly. Heinemann said it was bad-mannered to be too precise—and the way the customers were going for the idea, it had to be right.

When Lilymary says she can’t complete the job as she needs to go home to her father, Martin does it himself. Then, when she doesn’t come in the day after, Martin goes to her house. There he finds that the father, Lilymary, and the other three daughters are Sabbath observant.
The rest of the story sees Martin romantically pursue Lilymary, which provides a clash-of-cultures situation between him and the family, who have just returned to the United States after a long time in Borneo as religious missionaries. Consequently, they don’t have a TV or dishwasher or any mod-cons, or any interest in them. They also provide their own entertainment and, during an after dinner session, when Martin sings a particularly commercialised version of ’Tis the Season of Christmas (“Come Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.! Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!”), the atmosphere sours. Then, when he later arranges for the visit of a Santa Claus and the Elves sales team to the house, the relationship breaks down completely. Eventually (spoiler), at the suggestion of his boss, Martin proposes to Lilymary (“Why not marry her for a while?”), she rejects him, and then he finds out the family is leaving once again for Borneo, so he tries again. He eventually succeeds when he tracks them down to a church service, prays with Lilymary, and then gets religion.
This is okay I guess, but it would have been a more interesting piece if it had concentrated on the Christmas satire and not the boy-wants-girl story.
** (Average). 8, 250 words.

Winter Solstice by Mike Resnick

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Winter Solstice by Mike Resnick (F&SF, October-November 1991) doesn’t seem to have anything to do with the Winter Solstice but, instead, tells of the wizard Merlin, who in this story is quite a different creature from the one of myth—a man experiencing his life in reverse, starting from a point in the far-future where he could “pass among the stars and galaxies”. Unfortunately, his memories are slipping away from him, so he is of little help when he is called upon to deal with the problems of the present:

An old woman comes to see me in the early afternoon. Her arm is torn and miscolored; the stench of it makes my eyes water; the flies are thick around her.
I cannot stand the pain any longer, Merlin, she weeps. It is like childbirth, but does not go away. You are my only hope, Merlin. Cast your mystic spell, charge me what you will, but make the pain cease.
I look at her arm, where the badger has ripped it with his claws, and I want to turn my head away and retch. I finally force myself to examine it. I have a sense that I need something—I am not sure what—something to attach to the front of my face; or, if not my whole face, then at least across my nose and mouth, but I cannot recall what it is.
The arm is swollen to almost twice its normal size, and although the wound is halfway between her elbow and her shoulder, she shrieks in agony when I gently manipulate her fingers. I want to give her something for her pain. Vague visions come to mind, images of something long and slender and needle-like flash briefly before my eyes. There must be something I can do, I think, something I can give her, some miracle that I employed when I was younger and the world was older, but I can no longer remember what it is. I must do more than mask her pain; this much I still know, for infection has set in. The smell becomes stronger as I probe, and she screams. Gang, I think suddenly: the word for her condition begins with gang—but there is another syllable, and I cannot recall it; and even if I could recall it, I can no longer cure it.  p. 134

The story is told in a near stream of consciousness style which yo-yos between Merlin’s fragmentary memories of the future and his present concerns, one of which is what to do, if anything, about Launcelot and his illicit affair with King Arthur’s wife, Guinevere. This particular problem comes to a head when (spoiler) Arthur seeks out Merlin for advice on the matter towards the end of the story. Merlin realises that Arthur is more worried about his own death, and this makes Merlin reflect on what the future (or past) holds for him:

I decided to try once more to look into the future, to put his mind at ease. I close my eyes and I peer ahead, and I see not a mindless, babbling old man, but a mindless, mewling baby, and that baby is myself.
Arthur tries to look ahead to the future he fears, and I, traveling in the opposite direction, look ahead to the future I fear, and I realize that there is no difference, that this is the humiliating state in which man both enters and leaves the world, and that he had better learn to cherish the time in between, for it is all that he has.  p. 142

Merlin finally tells Arthur that he will die the death he wants.
There isn’t really any story here, but it’s not a bad mood piece.
*** (Good). 5,050 words.

Kitemaster by Keith Roberts

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Kitemaster by Keith Roberts (Interzone #1, Spring 1982),1 is the first of eight stories that make up the mosaic novel Kiteworld, and the opening of this piece, with its gloomy and atmospheric evocation of hangars and steam-driven machines, seems to consciously evoke that of his most successful novel Pavane: 2

The ground crew had all but finished their litany. They stood in line, heads bowed, silhouetted against the last dull flaring from the west; below me the Launch Vehicle seethed gently to itself, water sizzling round a rusted boiler rivet. A gust of warmth blew up toward the gantry, bringing scents of steam and oil to mingle with the ever-present smell of dope. At my side the Kitecaptain snorted, it seemed impatiently; shuffled his feet, sank his bull head even further between his shoulders.
I glanced round the darkening hangar, taking in the remembered scene; the spools of cable, head-high on their trolleys, bright blades of the anchor rigs, fathom on fathom of the complex lifting train. In the centre of the place, above the Observer’s wickerwork basket, the mellow light of oil lamps grew to stealthy prominence; it showed the spidery crisscrossings of girders, the faces of the windspeed telltales, each hanging from its jumble of struts. The black needles vibrated, edging erratically up and down the scales; beyond, scarcely visible in the gloom, was the complex bulk of the Manlifter itself, its dark, spread wings jutting to either side.

This passage also evokes another ‘Pavane’ story, The Signaller, but whereas that story was about a guild of signallers who transmitted messages the length and breadth of a Vatican dominated Europe by the use of huge semaphore towers, the organisation in this piece, a Corps of Kitemen, fly kite-like Manlifters or Cody rigs above the Badlands to ward off an unspecified threat.
There isn’t really much of a story here, and the narrative mostly concerns itself with the interplay between two characters: Kitemaster Helman, a high ranking official cum religious figure who is visiting the kitebase, and an unnamed Kitecaptain, who is the commander. As they watch the night launch of a Cody rig, the drunk Kitecaptain provides a stream of heretical comments about (a) their strange society (there are hints this is set after a nuclear apocalypse), (b) the salient wide malaise among the kitemen (it seems a string of suicides may have prompted Helman’s visit), and (c) the pointless of the defence they mount against the demons in the Badlands:

‘The Corps was formed,’ [Helman] said, ‘to guard the Realm, and keep its borders safe.’
‘From Demons,’ [the Kitecaptain] said bitterly. ‘From Demons and night walkers, all spirits that bring harm. . . .’ He quoted, savagely, from the Litany. ‘Some plunge, invisible, from highest realms of air; some have the shapes of fishes, flying; some, and these be hardest to descry, cling close upon the hills and very treetops. . . .’ I raised a hand, but he rushed on regardless. ‘These last be deadliest of all,’ he snarled. ‘For to these the Evil One hath given semblance of a Will, to seek out and destroy their prey . . . Crap!’ He pounded the desk again. ‘All crap,’ he said. ‘Every last syllable. The Corps fell for it though, every man jack of us. You crook your little fingers, and we run: we float up there like fools, with a pistol in one hand and a prayerbook in the other, waiting to shoot down bogles, while you live off the fat of the land. . . .’
[Helman] turned away from the window and sat down. ‘Enough,’ [he] said tiredly. ‘Enough, I pray you. . . .’

Later, the Kitemaster takes out a radio or similar device to listen to the Cody rig’s pilot, Observer Canwen, a legendary flier, and they briefly listen to his delusional ravings about his dead father and wife. The Kitecaptain eventually denounces the device as “necromancy” and smashes it, before recalling Canwen. As they draw him in there is a lightning strike, and the Cody rig crashes—although Canwen survives.
The next day a sheepish Kitecaptain, sober now and realising he has seriously overstepped the mark, arrives to see the Kitemaster off on the next leg of his journey. The Kitemaster is pragmatic and affable, and exhorts the Kitecaptain to keep the Codys flying “until something better comes along. . . .”
This was probably my fourth time reading this story and I enjoyed the atmosphere and the interplay of the fully realised characters—but, if you come to this cold, and/or on its own, your mileage may vary. (It struck me as an odd story to start a series.)
*** (Good). 6,400 words. Story link.

1. This story first appeared in a German language anthology, Tor zu den Sternen (“Gate to the Stars”), 1981.

2. More accurately, I’m referring to the opening of the first of the ‘Pavane’ stories, The Lady Margaret (Impulse #1, April 1966, as The Lady Anne).

At three in the afternoon the engine sheds were already gloomy with the coming night. Light, blue and vague, filtered through the long strips of the skylights, showing the roofties stark like angular metal bones. Beneath, the locomotives waited brooding, hulks twice the height of a man, their canopies brushing the rafters. The light gleamed in dull spindle shapes, here from the strappings of a boiler, there from the starred boss of a flywheel. The massive road wheels stood in pools of shadow.  p. 6

Miracle by Connie Willis

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Miracle by Connie Willis (Asimov’s Science Fiction, December 1991) gets off to a leisurely start with some office chit-chat about Christmas between the protagonist, Lauren, and one of her office colleagues, Evie, and this lays out most of the elements that will feature in this tale: two of their co-workers, Scott Buckley (“too cute to ever notice someone like me”), and Fred Hatch (“the fat guy in documentation”), and the movies Miracle on 34th Street and It’s Wonderful Life.
The final character in this Unknown-like fantasy appears when Lauren gets home, and she is door-stepped by an irritating young man saying he is there to give her a Christmas Present. Despite her shutting the door on him twice, he appears in the apartment:

The young man was sitting on the couch, messing with her TV remote. “So, what do you want for Christmas? A yacht? A pony?” He punched buttons on the remote, frowning. “A new TV?”
“How did you get in here?” Lauren said squeakily. She looked at the door. The deadbolt and chain were both still on.
“I’m a spirit,” he said, putting the remote down. The TV suddenly blared on. “The Spirit of Christmas Present.”
“Oh,” Lauren said, edging toward the phone. “Like in A Christmas Carol.”
“No,” he said, flipping through the channels. She looked at the remote. It was still on the coffee table. “Not Christmas Present. Christmas Present. You know, Barbie dolls, ugly ties, cheese logs, the stuff people give you for Christmas.”
“Oh, Christmas Present. I see,” Lauren said, carefully picking up the phone.
“People always get me confused with him, which is really insulting. I mean, the guy obviously has a really high cholesterol level. Anyway, I’m the Spirit of Christmas Present, and your sister sent me to—”
Lauren had dialed nine one. She stopped, her finger poised over the second one. “My sister?”
“Yeah,” he said, staring at the TV. Jimmy Stewart was sitting in the guard’s room, wrapped in a blanket. “Oh, wow! It’s a Wonderful Life.”
My sister sent you, Lauren thought. It explained everything. He was not a Moonie or a serial killer. He was this year’s version of the crystal pyramid mate selector. “How do you know my sister?”
“She channeled me,” he said, leaning back against the sofa. “The Maharishi Ram Das was instructing her in trance-meditation, and she accidentally channeled my spirit out of the astral plane.” He pointed at the screen. “I love this part where the angel is trying to convince Jimmy Stewart he’s dead.” pp. 143-144

After this he tells her that he is there is give what she really wants for Christmas, “her heart’s desire”, before going on to criticise her computer addressed cards, store wrapped presents, etc. Then he disappears, along with her cards, and leaves a Christmas tree growing out of her kitchen floor.
The rest of the story sees Lauren recruit Frank to help her deal with her spirit problem, and the two of them work together to try and get rid of him, as well as cope with various other changes Chris the spirit makes, such as Lauren’s off-the-shoulder black party dress—bought to impress Scott—being changed into a Yanomano Indian costume (Frank helpfully suggests she could wear last year’s pretty red number).
At this point (spoiler) I could see that Lauren was going to end up with Frank and not Scott, and so it materialises (dates with Scott are thwarted by Chris, Frank and Lauren have to come up with last minute gifts for everyone at the office when only Office Depot is open, Fred arrives at the party with the cheese puffs Lauren was meant to bring, Evie arrives wearing the black dress, etc., etc.). Finally, Chris arrives at the party dressed as Santa Claus.
This is an entertaining fantasy rom-com that gets off to a very good start, but I thought it tailed off towards the end (I’m not sure if this is because of pacing/padding problems, or because I guessed where it was going). I also thought that the two movies are referenced too much—but this is maybe a function of describing enough about them to those who aren’t familiar with them. Overall, though, not bad.
***+ (Good to Very Good, or, more accurately, Very Good to Good). 14,000 words.

The Bumblebee and the Berry by M. Bennardo

Posted on by Paul Fraser

The Bumblebee and the Berry by M. Bennardo (Analog, January-February 2022) takes place on hollowed-out asteroid, a generation starship which is making its fourth approach to a star system after missing on the first three attempts (over the previous twenty-seven years). While the ship gets closer to the planet they are aiming at, Axel, the governor of the colony, watches the local wildlife in their small biosphere—in particular a bumblebee that keeps trying to land on a bowl of blackberries. He wafts his hand nearby to disrupt the air currents, which causes it to fly away.
After this scene setting is complete the story closes with Axel getting an update from a woman called Raina about the approach. During this exchange she clumsily swats at the bumblebee; he shows her how to waft the nearby air instead. Axel (spoiler) then has an epiphany that the planet they are heading for may be occupied, and that they are the ones who are being kept away from what they want:

They would simply continue, as they had been. They would have no choice but to keep living as they were: making what room they could for the deer and the rabbits and the bumblebees, doing their best to avoid stepping on ants and wildflowers. Anything else would mean their own destruction. And who knew? Perhaps if they could prove they could do it. . . For a hundred years, or for a thousand. . . Then they might one day make another pass, and might one day be allowed to make starfall. They might no longer be brushed away.  p. 95

Apart from the fact this piece is a notion or eco-lecture and not a story, I’m not convinced by the bumblebees making for the blackberries—wasps and butterflies maybe, but I’m pretty sure the bees in my garden always go for flowers and their pollen.
I’d also note the language used at the beginning of the story is unnecessarily confusing—they aren’t making “starfall”, they are making planetfall, i.e. they intend landing on a planet not a star. And what has the “heliopause” (a word I bounced off of) got to do with anything? More unnecessary Analog jargon.
* (Mediocre). 2,200 words.

Charioteer by Ted Rabinowitz

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Charioteer by Ted Rabinowitz (Analog, January-February 2022) is essentially a re-do of Arthur C. Clarke’s Sunjammer, except this one has a woman pilot: she is a prisoner who is racing around the sun trying to win her freedom from the tyrannical “Executive”, and someone has sabotaged her sail-ship.
Most of the story tells of how she engineers her way out of her predicament, and a lot of this is written in that jargon-filled Analog prose that makes your eyes bleed:

Now that power was flowing, the sensor net was active throughout the entire field of sail. It told her that the power spike had done more than blow out the main nodes; it had deactivated the carcerands in the sails. Each carcerand was a molecular cage trapping a second, free-spinning cluster of atoms inside. The inner cluster could be oriented by a magnetic field. Polarized in one direction, it rendered a sail opaque; in another direction, it created the brilliant mirror of a lightsail.
The power spike had fused 90 percent of those inner clusters with their carcerands. She was riding a giant disc of ashes.  p. 73

That last sentence isn’t bad, but I’m pretty sure there is a more elegant way to write the paragraph that precedes it.
Ultimately (spoiler) she manages to fix things but discovers she has received a fatal dose of radiation—so she crashes her ship into the station where the politicians are watching the race.
Apart from the bad writing (mostly too much engineering jargon), the political prisoner gimmick doesn’t convince.
* (Mediocre). 3,300 words.

Splitting a Dollar by Meghan Hyland

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Splitting a Dollar by Meghan Hyland (Analog, January-February 2022) is narrated by an AI which supervises a cache of advanced tech that has been left on the Moon by a previous human diaspora for future generations. The story opens with the AI watching two humans (“let’s you and I call them Amy and Brad”) approach.
The rest of the story is mostly about the disagreement between Amy and Brad about what they should take back to Earth: Amy wants equipment that will augment human intelligence; Brad wants to take back bacteria that can sieve out gold from mud. Then (spoiler) Brad punctures his suit, and Amy offers to trade her emergency O2 for his pouch space: he attacks her, she fends him off, and he is eventually forced to concede.
This is okay, I suppose, but I didn’t really buy the set-up, or the fact that they were supposed to be a couple (their arguments are contrived as well as irritating). And, a more minor point, the AI addressing the reader at the beginning of the story breaks suspension of disbelief.
** (Average). 5,200 words.

Track of a Legend by Cynthia Felice

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Track of a Legend by Cynthia Felice (Omni, December 1983) takes place at unspecified point in the future (but after a “Christmas Treaty of ’55”) and is narrated by a schoolgirl. After some preliminary scene setting at school, she goes on a sledging trip with a friend called Timothy to the top of a nearby hill where the latter’s aunt lives in a metal cylinder (the aunt came back from space after the treaty of ’55, and doesn’t go out because of agoraphobia). Their outing ends when they throw snowballs at the video sensors on the house, and the aunt sets her robotic grass cutter on them—they only just get over the big fence in time. As they return home they note the large footprints of a legendary creature they refer to as Bigfoot, and arrange to go hunting for it after Christmas Day.
The second act opens on Christmas morning, when the narrator finds that her parents have got her a new sledge—so she sets off for the hill. Once she arrives she notes the recent large snowfall and decides to build a ramp at the fence to use as ski ramp at the end of her downhill run. Subsequently (spoiler), she misses the ramp and ends up stuck upside down on the fence. Then, when she hears something moving behind her later on, she fears it is Bigfoot, but the thing unhooking her from the fence turns out to be someone in a mechanical space-suit: we realise that the Timothy’s aunt is “Bigfoot”.
This is a relatively plotless narrative with little in the way of complication, but it has an interesting setting and it’s well told. A minor, but pleasant, story.
*** (Good). 5,050 words. Story link.

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas Trombone by Raymond E. Banks (F&SF, January 1954) is set in a future world where Venusian creatures called “singing cones” can curate and produce “wafer thin discs of Venusian heavy water” which store perfect musical recordings. The story’s main character, Shorty, is an ex-musician who was put out of work by the cones, and the tale begins with him grabbing his trombone from the cupboard and going down to the church on Christmas Eve. On his way there, the chief of police, who has previously warned Shorty about playing in public (“disturbing the peace” in this new musical world), confiscates the instrument.
Shorty continues on to the church to exchange gifts with the clergyman, Dr Blaine, who asks if he will be coming to the service. Shorty tells him no, as Blaine has a singing cone to provide music:

Dr. Blaine took him by the arm and led him into the nave.
Across from them rested the only true singing cone in Blessington. It was almost eight feet high, a tapering mound of pure whiteness, just as it had been on Venus. It “lived” on sound, not talking voices, not explosions or discords. It “lived” on music adding every sweet sound it heard to its repertoire until all its water was solidified and it could no longer hear and remember.
[. . .]
“Here,” said Dr. Blaine, “I’ve got all the great artists who ever recorded Christmas music, Shorty. The best voices, the best arrangements.”
“I know.”
“People need the solemn pageantry of the greatest church music to find the Christmas spirit in these commercial times.”
“Yeah.”
“This cone was a foot-high mound on Venus the night Christ was born in Bethlehem, Shorty. It’s been on earth now for twenty years, adding only the purest and best church music to its being.”
“It’s only been in Blessington five years,” said Shorty, “while I been here 45, man, boy and molecule.”
Dr. Blaine sighed. “Nobody wants the old choir and organ anymore, Shorty. When the cone plays we go back along the centuries to Bethlehem, we watch the miracles beside the Red Sea, we are in the room where the Last Supper was served and we walk with Christ up that final hill—”
“A couple of times I got ’em pretty excited with that old organ you got stashed in the basement.”
“Then play for the cone, Shorty,” said Dr. Blaine. “Play for the cone and make it hear and remember your notes alone with the world’s best musicians.”  pp. 120-121

Shorty doesn’t engage, and tells Blaine his air car needs a new rotor blade (Shorty now works as a mechanic).
The next part of the story sees Shorty arguing with his wife Edith, who tells him he needs to move on, and stop being so bitter about the fact that he has been replaced by the cones. Shorty angrily leaves the apartment and goes to the police station where, after some chit-chat with the desk cop, he slugs him and retrieves his trombone.
The last scene (spoiler) sees Shorty go up a hill near the town and play his trombone, a few notes of Joy to the World. Then he hears the cone at the church play a few of his notes back to him. Shorty starts playing Silent Night:

The cone was silent, listening. He could feel its presence in the background. A moment before it had been scouring out the valley with its sound. Now it was comparing his notes with all the wonderful music stored in its memory.
Softly, you son-of-a-bitch, he told himself. This is final. Shorty, by God, now we’ve got to do the thing!
For 45 seconds he reached the great plane of art that he’d been trying to reach all his life. For 45 seconds he made music that no human or nonhuman agency had ever made before or would ever make again. It was one of those moments. It was clear and clean, human but not gooey. It was one tiny notch more than satisfactory.  pp. 124-125

After Shorty has finished and listens to the cone playing his music back to him, he realises that, after comparing his performance to everything it has stored, the cone has changed nothing (“In Bethlehem, on Venus and beyond to outer space it was a thing of perfect uniqueness.”)
Shorty, finally at peace with himself, throws his horn away.
The story’s cone gimmick is a little artificial (and confusing to begin with) but the last scene is very good, and the story’s arc of a troubled soul finding solace works well in this Christmas tale. One for the ‘Best of the Year’ lists, perhaps.
***+ (Good to Very Good). 3,900 words. Story link.

Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov

Posted on by Paul Fraser

Christmas on Ganymede by Isaac Asimov (Startling Stories, January 1942)1 opens with Olaf Johnson hanging decorations in the colony’s dome when he and all the other men are summoned to a meeting with their boss: they learn that, thanks to Johnson, the native Ossies (who are the colony’s labour force) have learned about Christmas and will go on strike unless Santa Claus visits. Johnson is nominated to be Santa.
The rest of the story sees the conversion of an anti-grav sled into a sleigh, the capture and sedation of Ganymedean spineybacks for use as reindeer, and the costuming of Johnson:

“I’m not going anywhere in this costume!” he roared, gouging at the nearest eye. “You hear me?”
There certainly was cause for objection. Even at his best, Olaf had never been a heartthrob. But in his present condition, he resembled a hybrid between a spinie’s nightmare and a Picassian conception of a patriarch.
He wore the conventional costume of Santa. His clothes were as red as red tissue paper sewed onto his space coat could make it. The “ermine” was as white as cotton wool, which it was. His beard, more cotton wool glued into a linen foundation, hung loosely from his ears. With that below and his oxygen nosepiece above, even the strongest were forced to avert their eyes. p. 88

Johnson’s perilous flight to the Ossies’ camp is made even more dangerous when the spineys wake up en route, but he eventually gets there safely. The Ossies get Christmas tree ornaments for presents (they think the globes are “Sannyclaws eggs”), and then demand a visit every year—which to them is a seven-day revolution around Jupiter.
This is an early work by Asimov that’s longer than it needs to be and whose characters are rather cartoonish (one of the prospectors—sorry, colonists—chews tobacco). But it’s a pleasant enough piece that produced a couple of smiles.
** (Average). 5,450 words. Story link.

1. This was published around the same time as Nightfall and the first ‘Foundation’ stories (late 1941 to mid-1942), but was written a year or so earlier, as Asimov notes in The Early Asimov:

The success of “Reason” didn’t mean that I was to have no further rejections from Campbell.
On December 6, 1940, influenced by the season and never stopping to think that a Christmas story must sell no later than July in order to make the Christmas issue, I began “Christmas on Ganymede.” I submitted it to him on the twenty-third, but the holiday season did not affect his critical judgment. He rejected it.
I tried Pohl next, and, as was happening so often that year, he took it. In this case, for reasons I will describe later, the acceptance fell through. I eventually sold it the next summer (June 27, 1941, the proper time of year) to Startling Stories, the younger, sister magazine of Thrilling Wonder Stories.