{"id":1779,"date":"2021-11-04T12:31:46","date_gmt":"2021-11-04T12:31:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1779"},"modified":"2021-11-04T12:31:49","modified_gmt":"2021-11-04T12:31:49","slug":"holiday-by-richard-christian-matheson","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=1779","title":{"rendered":"Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><strong><em>Holiday<\/em><\/strong> by Richard Christian Matheson (<em>Twilight Zone<\/em>, February 1982) starts with the narrator on holiday at a Bermudan beach when another tourist, a fat man with white hair and a rosy complexion, starts talking to him. After some chitchat the man says his name is Santa Claus. The narrator humours the man (who he thinks is a nut), and asks why he didn\u2019t get an autographed photo of Joe DiMaggio when he was a kid. Claus mutters an excuse, and they briefly talk about other matters until Claus says he has an early flight to catch, and leaves.<br>This is okay I guess, but the ending isn\u2019t really a surprise.<\/p>\n\n\n\n<p>** Average. 1950 words.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Holiday by Richard Christian Matheson (Twilight Zone, February 1982) starts with the narrator on holiday at a Bermudan beach when another tourist, a fat man with white hair and a rosy complexion, starts talking to him. After some chitchat the man says his name is Santa Claus. The narrator humours the man (who he thinks [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"nf_dc_page":"","_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[452],"tags":[451,17,449,444,12,450],"class_list":["post-1779","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-richard-christian-matheson","tag-451","tag-17","tag-richard-christian-matheson","tag-santa-claus","tag-short-story","tag-twilight-zone"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_likes_enabled":true,"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1779"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1781,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1779\/revisions\/1781"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1779"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1779"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1779"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}