“Yet Christmas, in spite of all the doubts of our different ages, is a fine and splendid time, and now as we pass the midpoint of December our expectations are heightened by the increasing coldness that has settled down upon us.”

Maybe because this is the shortest story in the collection, it’s exceptionally hard to select a single quotation for these introductory paragraphs. And this story so poignantly captures a mood, that I find myself wanting to type the entire story rather than offer personal commentary.

When I sat down to think about what to say, looking out at the world from an upper floor, I ended up thinking about Christmases past, instead of the story. About how there is so rarely snow for the 25th anymore. Outdoors today, the nearing-winter feels like March: wet and grey, earthy and gritty. The day has a moistness to it that creates an enduring slick, a layer that lingers for hours after you’ve returned indoors. This is the kind of day during which I miss the snow more than usual. It’s some consolation to see that there are snow showers forecast for the 23rd and 24th, missing the Solstice but, maybe, in time for Christmas.

The weather from past Christmases is the simplest Christmas memory to share. Sometimes it snowed a lot and that made me happy (especially when there was enough packing snow to make forts and hideaways) and that’s rare now. The other Christmas and holiday memories crowd in and soon thoughts of the weather are, as in the numerous photographs of Christmases past, just background.

The eleven-year-old boy in “To Every Thing There Is a Season” is writing from a place of knowing; he has lived long enough, on the other side of eleven, to recognize the hinge between experiencing Christmas as a child and experiencing it as an adult.

“The younger ones for my brothers say ‘from Santa Claus’ but mine are not among them any more, as I know with certainty they will never be again. Yet I am not so much surprised as touched by a pang of loss at being here on the adult side of the world. It is as if I have suddenly moved into another room and heard a door click lastingly behind me. I am jabbed by my own small wound.”

This would make for a lovely annual reread, this story of a single Christmas in Cape Breton—this universal story of discovery and home, innocence and loss—like many people return to Charles Dickens and Dylan Thomas. The standalone volume, pictured above, with illustrations by Peter Rankine, is particularly lovely.

The play between living and remembering, familiar from so many other MacLeod stories is on full display here. “For Christmas is a time of both past and present and often the two are imperfectly blended. As we step into its nowness we often look behind.”

We can think back to earlier stories, like “The Closing Down of Summer”, to contemplate how a narrator inhabits “both past and present” and how navigating memory contributes to life in the present-day: “I do not particularly welcome it or want it, and indeed I had almost forgotten it. Yet it enters now, regardless of my wants or wishes, much as one might see out of the corner of the eye an old acquaintance one has no wish to see at all. It comes again, unbidden and unexpected and imperfectly remembered.”

MacLeod allows for this process, this falling away and rebuilding of memory, vacillating from one sentence to the next. For instance: “We have been waiting now, it seems, forever.” It’s followed by a correction: “Actually, it has been most intense since Hallowe’en when the first snow fell upon us as we moved like muffled mummers upon darkened country roads.” What might feel like “forever” can be—indeed, is—expressed more accurately. (Even those rural snowy roads added in for flavour.)

Neither unbidden nor unexpected though: Christmas is anticipated and welcomed, rather. But, yes, perhaps it’s “imperfectly remembered” too. Structurally, here, there are very few pages to hold contradictory ideas about the narrator’s prior (or later) Christmases. Instead, the other Christmases are echoed in the presence of the various children, of different ages. And in the presence of the parents, who have been those other—younger—ages on previous Christmases (which are recognized as having been real in some way, but unreal in others).

There is also the matter of belief, not just the Church attendance but the story of Santa. “Kenneth, however, believes with an unadulterated fervour, and so do Bruce and Barry, who are six-year-old twins. Beyond me there is Anne who is thirteen and Mary who is fifteen, both of whom seem to be leaving childhood at an alarming rate. My mother has told us that she was already married when she was seventeen, which is only two years older than Mary is now.”

Via our freshly attentive narrator, readers can “look behind”, inhabit the “nowness”, and imagine the “beyond”: it’s all so recognizable. He can even distinguish between his mother’s “look behind” and her “nowness”—and there is a hint of what’s beyond for the parents, which opens that wound, on the other side of that closed door, in the second quotation above.

The handling of time in this short story is deft and astute; therein lies the resonance of this tale. Atmospheric detail is unsentimental but evocative. “My family pours them drinks of rum and my mother takes out her mincemeat and the fruitcakes she has been carefully hoarding.”

Simple rituals feel familiar, even though there was never any rum on holidays, when I was a girl. Even though the idea of fruitcake back then was always preferable to the reality of fruitcake. (There was rum in the fruitcake; I remember the smell of it.) There’s also “the excitement of decoration” and the “fir tree on the hill.”

But there is also an extended joy in the scene where the narrator opens the parcels, sent to the Cape by the older brother, who has been working away, in the west. Packages which arrived over time, before his return, packages which were expected to hold his belongings but which, when opened, contained presents instead: “neatly wrapped” and “bearing tags.”

As an adult reading this story, I suspected the packages contained presents. I hoped they did. But even though this is my third time reading this story (that I recall, perhaps more), I still wasn’t sure. Maybe it was, really, just his belongings. There are other young men in these stories, who go away to work and return for holidays; maybe my memory of this one’s inaccurate. But, no, they are presents after all. It was “imperfectly remembered”…and happy.

What are you reading with the holidays in mind? 

For the better part of two years, I am rereading Alistair MacLeod’s short stories, from start to stop, just as I’ve done with Alice Munro’s and Mavis Gallant’s short stories previously. If you love short stories or if you would like to be a short-story lover, several of these authors’ stories are among my favourites, and would make an excellent introduction to the finest of the form. If you have other favourite story writers, please feel free to contribute those to the conversation too.