Unawares by Hildegarde Hawthorne (New England Magazine, December 1908) opens with elderly couple sitting together on Xmas Eve; they talk about how they wish they had had a child, something they would have appreciated at this time of year. During their conversation, a young girl called Desiree turns up at their door, and starts calling them Grandpa and Grandma. They take temporary care of the child, and give her presents and read her stories, etc.
After this one-two setup, the story ends the next day (spoiler) with a neighbour coming to the house to find the couple dead, but with a smile on their faces.
I think the intent here is probably to show that couple get a dying wish, but the ending leaves a sour taste in the mouth. The piece is also more of a punchline than a story.
* (Mediocre). 1,750 words.
A Foreigner’s Christmas in China by Maureen F. McHugh
A Foreigner’s Christmas in China by Maureen F. McHugh (Christmas Ghosts, 1993) has the narrator (perhaps the writer) going to a Christmas Eve party for ex-pats in China. Then, on the way home, she is accosted by a young girl who says she is the narrator’s Christmas Spirit. The narrator tries to fob her off and go home, but she blacks out, and then finds herself at an underground (and illegal in China) Catholic service.
The next (Christmas Carol-like) stop is in the living room of the cook of the special dining room the narrator uses at work. She doesn’t know the man that well (a language issue) but it soon becomes clear that he and his wife do not get on, and that he may be cheating. The Christmas Spirit tells the narrator she is here, “To show you his choice”.
The final visit is to a shared room where one of her ex-students lives, a young woman who is an untreated depressive and almost completely withdrawn. The narrator reflects that she has similar mental health issues but has always managed to avoid the abyss into which the young woman has fallen. She remembers a previous depressive episode, and how she came out of it one day when she noticed the beauty of a maple tree: she resolved to choose that viewpoint in the future.
Then (spoiler) the narrator realises that she has stopped doing so—at which point she finds herself back on the road.
The final part of the story sees the writer intrude into the story even more and talk more directly about her time in China and why she went there (although her specific reasons are never revealed). She concludes with this:
Maybe I had a sort of blackout on Red Flag Road, or maybe I met an old Chinese spirit. I am telling you now, I don’t know. But some things you must choose. Choose a bad marriage, choose a bad life, or choose to look around you and see.
Interesting final point, but I’m not entirely sure the story’s different parts sum to that observation (what was the point of the church service scene, for one thing?) I also wondered whether this is really a story, or self-therapy for the writer. Whatever of those two is true (probably both) it has an interesting Chinese setting and wise final message. If you don’t squint too hard, it sort of works.
*** (Good). 4,150 words.
Santa Clause by Robert F. Young
Santa Clause by Robert F. Young (F&SF, January 1959)1 starts with Ross requesting his own personal Santa Claus from the devil (who he has just summoned). The devil agrees, but says he can’t subdivide “childhood fantasy”.
Ross subsequently gets the Xmas presents he wants, including a pretty blonde wife called Candy, but things starts going awry almost at once: she refuses to have anything to do with him after she has kissed him goodnight and shuts him out of her bedroom; then Jack Frost appears to ice the windows; the Sandman throws sand in his eyes before he sleeps; and a Guardian Angel—a guitar playing cowboy with wings—appears. Later on, Candy becomes pregnant (even though Ross still hasn’t been near her).
Eventually, after a few more months of these childhood fantasies (and the Easter Bunny, Tooth Fairy, etc.), the Stork comes tapping at the window. Ross decides he has had enough, and once more summons the Devil: Ross tells him he wants out of the deal. The Devil agrees to modify their contract so that he won’t live in a world of childhood fantasy—but again specifies it will be for life, and apply retrospectively.
The final twist of the story (spoiler) has Ross loathing Candy, when he thinks of her, “almost as much as his mother”.
I guess the wife-mother psychosexual tangle made sense to 1950s Freudians, but it seems quite quaint today.
** (Average). 3,600 words.
1. I initially wondered if this story had first appeared in Playboy and, when I learned not, whether it was written with that magazine in mind.
The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman
The Wild Wood by Mildred Clingerman (F&SF, January 1957)1 opens with a family trailing around town looking for a Christmas tree. Margaret, the mother/narrator, has had enough, but their insistent four-year-old daughter drags them down a side street, and they end up at “Cravolini’s Christmas Tree Headquarters”.
While her husband and daughter go into the depths of the barn-like structure to find the perfect tree, Margaret is surprised by the owner, Cravolini, who touches her forearm—this gives Margaret a brief vision of the pair of them in a cabin, and the feeling that they have met before. Her husband interrupts the encounter before she can make sense of it, and she goes to join the rest of them:
Don led her down one of the long aisles of trees to where Bonnie and Bruce were huddled beside their choice. Margaret scarcely glanced at the tree. Don was annoyed with her—half-convinced, as he always was, that Margaret had invited the pass. Not by any overt signal on her part, but simply because she forgot to look busy and preoccupied.
“Don’t go dawdling along in that wide-eyed dreamy way,” he’d said so often. “I don’t know what it is, but you’ve got that look—as if you’d say yes to a square meal or to a panhandler or to somebody’s bed.” pp. 124-125
The sexual frankness here is not the first instance of this in the story—during an earlier embrace, her “frank desire” is referred to—and both pale in comparison to the second encounter between her and Cravolini while she is looking at four blue candles:
“Do you like those candles?” he asked softly.
“Where is my husband?” Margaret kept her eyes on Bruce’s fine blond hair. Don’t let the door open any more. . . .
“You’re husband has gone to bring his car. He and your daughter. The tree is too large to carry so far. Why are you afraid?”
“I’m not afraid. . . .” She glanced fleetingly into the man’s eyes, troubled again that her knowledge of his identity wavered just beyond reality. “Have we met before?” she asked.
“I almost saw you once,” Cravolini said. “I was standing at a window. You were reflected in it, but when I turned around you were gone. There was nobody in the room but my sister . . . the stupid cow. . . .” Cravolini spat into the sawdust. “That day I made a candle for you. Wait.” He reached swiftly behind the stacked packing boxes that held the candles on display. He had placed it in her hand before she got a clear look at it. Sickeningly pink, loathsomely slick and hand-filling. It would have been cleaner, more honest, she thought, if it had been a frank reproduction of what it was intended to suggest. pp. 125-126
The rest of the story tells of further visits over the years, with Cravolini repeating his behaviour and Margaret unable to tell her husband. Then, on the climactic visit (spoiler) she meets the sister at the door of the store, who directs her to a bed at the back. When Margaret gets there she realises she is now the body of the sister, and she watches herself leave the shop with her husband and family. Cravolini has “the proud, silly spirit” he desired.
I’m not sure the possession ending makes much conventional sense, but the story works on a dreamlike/nightmare level, and is notable for its unconcealed sexuality.
*** (Good). 3,450 words. Story link.
1. I recently bought this writer’s collected short story volume, The Clingerman Files (Amazon UK £2.99). I suppose I should really get into it, but I rather like coming across stories like this, and Stair Trick (F&SF, August 1952), one by one in the wild.
Christmas Tree by John Christopher
Christmas Tree by John Christopher (Astounding, February 1949) opens with an astronaut called Davies arriving on Earth. After his medical (we learn that space crew get one after every flight), he goes to buy a Christmas tree to take back to the Moon. We subsequently learn that a man called Hans has been exiled there for forty years because of a final health warning, which meant it would be suicide to undertake another trip back to Earth (the story’s gimmick is that no-one can predict how long it will be between an astronaut’s first and final warning—there can be several years between them—and many astronauts take the chance of continuing for a period after the first).
At the nursery, the owner shows Davies around:
“Major Davies, I’m delighted to see you. We don’t see many spacemen. Come and see my roses.”
He seemed eager and I let him take me. I wasn’t breaking my neck to get back into town.
He had a glasshouse full of roses. I hesitated in the doorway. Mr. Cliff said: “Well?”
“I’d forgotten they smelled like that,” I told him.
He said proudly, “It’s quite a showing. A week before Christmas and a showing like that. Look at this Frau Karl Druschki.”
It was a white rose, very nicely shaped and scented like spring. The roses had me. I crawled around after Mr. Cliff, seeing roses, feeling roses, breathing roses. I looked at my watch when it began to get dark.
After Davies explains Hans’ situation to the owner (during which he reveals he has had his own first health warning) he gets the tree for free.
When Davies eventually gets back to the Moon (spoiler), he and Louie (the part-time quartermaster who helped him smuggle the tree onboard) go to find Hans, but they find that he has passed away. The pair, along with another man, take Hans out onto the surface to bury him:
Portugese halted the caterpillar on the crest of a rise about midway between Luna City and Kelly’s Crater. It was the usual burial ground; the planet’s surface here was crosshatched in deep grooves by some age-old catastrophe. We clamped down the visors on our suits and got out. Portugese and I carried old Hans easily between us, his frail body fantastically light against lunar gravity. We put him down carefully in a wide, deep cleft, and I turned around toward the truck. Louie walked toward us, carrying the Christmas tree.
There had been moisture on it, which had frozen instantly into sparkling frost. It looked like a centerpiece out of a store window. It had seemed a good idea back in Luna City, but now it didn’t seem appropriate.
We wedged it in with rocks, Portugese read a prayer, and we walked back to the caterpillar, glad to be able to let our visors down again and light up cigarettes. We stayed there while we smoked, looking through the front screen. The tree stood up green and white against the sullen, hunching blackness of Kelly’s Crater. Right overhead was the Earth, glowing with daylight. I could make out Italy, clear and unsmudged, but farther north Hans’s beloved Austria was hidden under blotching December cloud.
The story finishes with Davies going to his delayed medical, where he gets his final warning—he is stuck on the Moon. Later, Davies goes to the observatory, where he looks at Earth and thinks he can smell roses.
The science in this story is a bit dated or just plain wrong in some parts (information about the Moon’s rotation, atmosphere, and body-eating insect life, etc.) but, if you can filter that out, it’s a pretty good piece, and an accomplished debut.
*** (Good). 3,200 words. Story link.
Merry Gravmas by James P. Hogan
Merry Gravmas by James P. Hogan (Minds, Machines and Evolution, 1988) sets up, in its short introduction, a world two thousand years from now, where Christmas Day is used to celebrate the birth of Isaac Newton, “who came to save us all from irrationality”. It is told from the point of view of a Chinese family (Europe is in ruins), and is moderately amusing.
** (Average). 1,100 words.
A Proper Santa Claus by Anne McCaffrey
A Proper Santa Claus by Anne McCaffrey (Demon Kind, 1973) opens with a young boy called Jeremy painting a cookie (which he eats) and drinking a glass of Coke (which he drinks). As the story develops we see more of his artistic creations, and realise that he isn’t imagining all this but has an ability to make what he paints come to life:
Although he dutifully set out trick-or-treating, he came home early. His mother made him sort out his candy, apples, and money for UNICEF, and permitted him to stay up long past his regular bedtime to answer the door for other beggars. But, once safely in his room, he dove for his easel and drew frenetically, slathering black and blue poster paint across clean paper, dashing globs of luminescence for horrific accents. The proper ones took off or crawled obscenely around the room, squeaking and groaning until he released them into the night air for such gambols and aerial maneuvers as they were capable of. Jeremy was impressed. He hung over the windowsill, cheering them on by moonlight. (Around three o’clock there was a sudden shower. All the water solubles melted into the ground.)
As the story develops, Jeremy is unable to produce work that satisfies his teacher’s requirements, and this comes to a head with her criticism of his Santa project. This gives him “so overwhelming a sense of failure” that “he couldn’t imagine ever creating anything properly again”.
I suppose the message of this piece (criticism of children’s creative endeavours can be destructive) is valid enough, but I’m not sure that it provides a good story.
* (Mediocre). 3,300 words.
Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull
Mediation by Cadwell Turnbull (Entanglements: Tomorrow’s Lovers, Families, and Friends, 2020) starts with a widow recounting her family’s custom of having birthday dinners (her and her son’s in June, the daughter’s in August, and her dead husband’s in October). We also learn that she has been dodging these (or merging the October one with Thanksgiving) for a couple of years now, and this year has plans to go to a conference. This latter leads to an argument with her children, who want the tradition to survive. During their disagreement, their house AI suggests they should perhaps make the October meal a memorial one. The mother tells the AI (more annoying since its mediation code was loaded) to switch off.
Most of the rest of the story deals with the mother’s attempts to avoid dealing with her grief, although there is also an account of her husband’s diagnosis, and his decision that they should go to therapy before he died. During this period, he told her that he wasn’t happy with his reclusiveness, and he didn’t think she was either.
The conflict with her kids comes to a head when she returns home to find them having the memorial dinner without her; she stomps off to her room, where she talks to an AI copy of her husband. The story ends with reconciliation and cake.
This is well enough done but it is essentially a slight mainstream story (a woman comes to terms with her grief and reconciles with her children) with some SF furniture.
**+ (Average to Good). 4,300 words.
The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison
The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists by Harlan Ellison (F&SF, January 1982) is a Three Wise Men update that begins with one of them, Melichor, getting out of a Rolls Royce and inflating an air mattress. There then follows a certain amount of kvetching among the three (Melichor peppers his speech with Yiddish words, and the other two are later described as “Nubian” and “Oriental”). Then they eat, and later go to sleep.
They are woken the next day by the stench caused by the creatures of the underworld, which have reached their location and are overtaking them. So they gather their belongings and get back in the car.
They later turn back the Forces of Chaos and overcome other minor difficulties before arriving at a Hyatt hotel, where the Saviour is with his parents in a “moderately priced room”. There, they argue over what his name should be.
A weakly humorous non-story.
* (Mediocre). 1,450 words.
The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson
The Christmas Present by Gordon R. Dickson (F&SF, January 1958) opens with a young boy called Allan talking to an alien called Harvey about how his mother is decorating a thorn tree for the family’s first Xmas on the planet:
There was beauty on Cidor, but it was a different beauty. It was a black-and-silver world where the thorn trees stood up like fine ink sketches against the cloud-torn sky; and this was beautiful. The great and solemn fishes that moved about the uncharted pathways of its seas were beautiful with the beauty of large, far-traveled ships. And even Harvey, though he did not know it himself, was most beautiful of all with his swelling iridescent jellyfish body and the yard-long mantle of silver filaments spreading out through it and down through the water. Only his voice was croaky and unbeautiful, for a constricted air-sac is not built for the manufacture of human word. pp. 34-35
Allan adds that the decorations will make the tree beautiful, and that Harvey will understand what “beautiful” means when he sees the finished product. However, when Allan goes back to the house on his own, what he sees upsets him, as the tree isn’t the same as the one on the ship out. After his mother consoles him Allan goes out and briefly brings Harvey in to see the tree before taking him back to the water.
Allan and his mother wrap their presents later that evening, and he tells her that he wants to give Harvey one of his figurines, a painted clay astrogator, as a Christmas present. His mother tells him it is too late to go out again, so she goes to give the gift to Harvey instead, and also explains to the alien the concept of exchanging presents at Christmas time. Then she asks Harvey about water-bulls—dangerous sea creatures known to attack boats—as her husband will be coming back by river the next day. Harvey tells her their behaviour isn’t consistent (“One will. One will not”), before adding that his species is “electric”, so the water-bulls don’t bother them.
After Allan’s mother leaves (spoiler), Harvey swims out of the outlet and swims to a place between two islands where he finds a water-bull; he tells it he has come to make it into a present.
The story closes with Allan’s father returning home the next day by boat. En route he and the other settlers find a dead water-bull floating on the surface and, on closer examination, they find the crushed body of a Cidorian nearby. Allan’s father realises that the dead Cidorian is Harvey, his son’s friend, and asks the other settlers not to tell him about what they have seen. After they leave, there is an elegiac closing passage:
Behind them, the water-bull carcass, disturbed, slid free of the waterlogged tree and began to drift downriver. The current swung it and rolled, slowly, over and over until the crushed central body of the dead Cidorian rose into the clean air. And the yellow rays of the clear sunlight gleamed from the glazed pottery countenance of a small toy astrogator, all wrapped about with silver threads, and gilded it. p. 42
I didn’t really buy the ending of this one, which seems to involve an overly disproportionate act in return for a simple gift. But I liked the alien setting, Harvey, and the last passage was still rattling around inside my head days later.
*** (Good). 3,300 words. Story link.