{"id":2117,"date":"2021-12-22T13:05:27","date_gmt":"2021-12-22T13:05:27","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2117"},"modified":"2021-12-31T13:49:59","modified_gmt":"2021-12-31T13:49:59","slug":"happy-birthday-dear-jesus-by-frederik-pohl","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/?p=2117","title":{"rendered":"Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus<\/em><\/strong> by Frederik Pohl (Alternating Currents<\/em>, 1956) is, partially, an \u201cif this goes one\u201d satire about the commercialisation of Christmas, and begins with the story\u2019s narrator, Mr Martin, recruiting a young woman called Lilymary Hargreave for his department at Heinemann\u2019s store. Her job is to gift-wrap and label shoppers\u2019 Christmas purchases, and it\u2019s here where we get the first dose of satire (apart an earlier mention that this Christmas rush is happening in early September):<\/p>\n\n\n\n

[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, \u201cI\u2019m sorry, Mr. Martin, but I seem to have done something wrong.\u201d
The Shipping man snorted. \u201cLook for yourself, Mr. Martin,\u201d he said, handing me one of the packages.
I looked. It was wrong, all right. Heinemann\u2019s new wrinkle that year was a special attached gift card\u2014a simple Yule scene and the printed message:

The very Merriest of Season\u2019s Greetings
From …………………………………
To ……………………………………
$8.50

The price varied with the item, of course. Heinemann\u2019s 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\u2014and the way the customers were going for the idea, it had to be right.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

When Lilymary says she can\u2019t complete the job as she needs to go home to her father, Martin does it himself. Then, when she doesn\u2019t 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\u2019t 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 \u2019<\/span>Tis the Season of Christmas<\/em> <\/span>(\u201cCome Westinghouse, Philco! Come Hotpoint, G.E.! Come Sunbeam! Come Mixmaster! Come to the Tree!\u201d), 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 (\u201cWhy not marry her for a while?\u201d), 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Happy Birthday, Dear Jesus by Frederik Pohl (Alternating Currents, 1956) is, partially, an \u201cif this goes one\u201d satire about the commercialisation of Christmas, and begins with the story\u2019s narrator, Mr Martin, recruiting a young woman called Lilymary Hargreave for his department at Heinemann\u2019s store. Her job is to gift-wrap and label shoppers\u2019 Christmas purchases, and […]<\/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":[349],"tags":[404,17,581,542,351,7,582],"class_list":["post-2117","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-frederik-pohl","tag-404","tag-17","tag-alternating-currents","tag-christmas","tag-frederik-pohl","tag-novelette","tag-satire"],"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\/2117","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=2117"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2221,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2117\/revisions\/2221"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2117"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2117"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sfshortstories.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2117"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}