American Christmas Stories

American Christmas Stories (Library of America) edited by Connie Willis

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This is not a glittering collection of Christmas stories. There are a few that sparkle here, but the collection as a whole is surprisingly disappointing. For example, the O. Henry story is not “The Gift of the Magi,” but “A Chaparral Christmas Gift,” which is one of Henry's little-known stories. There is a “twist at the end” of that story but it feels labored getting there.

Labored seems to describe a number of stories. Bret Harte's “How Santa Claus Came to Simpson's Bar,” a story about several poor California miners fighting their way through bad men and elements to get a Christmas gift for a minor's sick son. Most of the early stories, written in the 19th century, are like that.

What redeems the collection is its chronological arrangement. We get to see how the tropes of Christmas develop over time, as well as how the writing style changes and seems to become more accessible. For example, Harte's story added the verb “objurgate” to my vocabulary.

The chronology starts with stories written in 1874 and ends with one written in 2016. With Harte's story, we get a sense of the real poverty that most Americans lived in. In other earlier stories, we have a longing for the antebellum south and home on the plantation. Paul Laurence Dunbar's story from 1900 tells the story of a black woman pining for the plantation past while in an apartment in New York whose Christmas is ruined when her young news seller son is arrested for underage gambling.

It's an interesting slice of history in fictional form, but as a Christmas story, a lot of readers are going to wonder what it means. There is also an unfortunate woke tendency for the editor to select African-American stories (by African Americans or about African Americans) that reinforce the trope of racism and that “Santa Claus is a White Man.” In the story of that title, the white man portraying Santa threatens to lynch a black child who has had his last quarter stolen by white children. (John Henrik Clarke 1939) In another story, Santa Claus mocks a black child who wanders into a whites-only department store. (“One Christmas Eve,” Langson Hughes 1933.) W.E.B. DuBois offers a parable about how a christ-analogy is born in Africa that ends with “blessed are you, Black Folk, when men make fun of you and mob you....” (The Sermon in the Cradle 1921.)

This is interesting stuff as history and provides a kind of perspective on a strand of the black experience. But is it the total experience? Are there no hopeful and optimistic stories about black people and Christmas? Not that we can tell, although “General Washington” is a kind of race-healing fable about a street urchin in Washington DC. (“General Washington,” Pauline E. Hopkins 1900.) Any reader looking for Christmas cheer in the former stories will find a thin gruel.

Similarly, after World War II, we start seeing the Jewish experience of Christmas. Most of these are surprisingly lovely and heart warming. “Mr. Kaplan and the Magi” was an extended joke based on an immigrant's poor English based on author Leo Rosten's experience as an English teacher during the Depression. (Leo Rosten 1937.) Grace Paley's “The Loudest Voice” describes the reaction of Jewish families to their children being dragooned into a Christmas play, with the ending reflecting the pragmatic sense that it was nice of the gentiles to share their beliefs with them. (1959.) Pete Hamill's “The Christmas Kid” was the rate story that brought a tear to my eye as it details the experience of a Jewish child released from the concentration camps with the Catholic community he finds himself in and the lengths they go to rescue him from dire peril. (1979.) Finally, Nathan Englander's “Reb Kingle” is another gem about a Rabbi who supplements his income with an annual stint as Santa Claus. (1979.)

The stories in the last third have an unusual number of science fiction. Ray Bradbury's “The Gift” (1952) is contributed, but not Arthur C. Clarke's “The Star.” There is a Gene Wolfe story, “The War Between the Tree” (1979.) It's nice to see Wolfe getting his due. On the other hand, I was disappointed with the Thomas Disch story (“The Santa Claus Compromise” 1974) could have been cute, but I felt the joke was labored. Connie Willis offers her own story - the longest in the book - “Inn” (1993) is nice, involving a very side-tracked Holy Couple winding up at a Methodist church in the 1990s and not at Bethlehem as scheduled.

Of course, we have to recognize the difficulty of diverse people with respect to integration. So, we have Amy Tan's “Fish Cheeks” (1987) and Jose R. Nieto's “Ixchel's Tears.” (1995.) These stories are mediocre, at best.

The latter is a bit of a fantasy. There is also a murder mystery - John Collier's “Back for Christmas” (1939) and a spy mystery - Mary Roberts Rinehart's “The Butler's Christmas Eve” (1944). The latter was one of my favorites in the book.

Another favorite, which took me by surprise, was “Santa Clo Comes to La Cuchilla by Abelard Diaz Alfaro (1947), which describes the clash of the new and the old in a humorous way that we can entirely imagine.

The contributions by Joan Didion and Dorothy Parker - basically modern women complaining about some aspect of Christmas or their ability to play their role in Christmas - were lackluster. On the other hand, a delight of the book was in becoming acquainted with so many other great writers that are forgotten today: Ben Hecht, James Thurber, Heywood Broun, Christopher Morley, and Damon Runyon. Many of these were mediocre - the Damon Runyon and James Thurber stories being an exception - but I know these names and I'm interested in seeing their other works.

So, in sum, it is strange that you have a collection that is better than its parts. If you come at this for the purpose of putting yourself into Christmas cheer, you will probably be disappointed. If you come at the book to dip into these short stories - and they are quite “dipable,” often being less than ten pages in length, and find out if there are any gems you may want to come back to, you may find it worth the investment.