Christmas/New Year's stories?

What are some of your favorite poems, novels, or short stories that are about Christmas? Pam Houston has a good Christmas story in Cowboys are my only weakness. In the story, the woman confronts within herself the fact of her lover's infidelity. Truman Capote wrote that excellent story, A Christmas Memory which is so tender. The story is about a little boy and his old Aunt going about town to get the fixings for the Aunt's Christmas Cakes. One thing she has to buy is alcohol, which is a problem because of prohibition. The story ends with an image of the little boy and his old Aunt flying kites. Robert Stone has a story that takes place around the holidays, called "Helping." It's about a character named Elliot who is about to fall off the wagon and begin drinking again.

What are some of your fave Xmas or New Years poems or tales?

I'm a sucker for "The Night Before Christmas" which my father used to read to us.

Does anyone else here read the Poet's Choice online?

I really enjoyed this Robert Pinsky piece at WashingtonPost.com. It's an odd sort of New Year's poem. I reproduce just a tad of it here:

The English poet Edward Thomas (1878-1917) describes a New Year's Day encounter that includes many of these elements: giddiness and the grotesque, childhood and old age, convention and idiosyncrasy, the outlandish and the familiar:

The New Year

He was the one man I met up in the woods

That stormy New Year's morning; and at first sight,

Fifty yards off, I could not tell how much

Of the strange tripod was a man. His body,

Bowed horizontal, was supported equally

By legs at one end, by a rake at the other:

Thus he rested, far less like a man than

His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig.

But when I saw it was an old man bent,

At the same moment came into my mind

The games at which boys bend thus, High-cockolorum,

Or Fly-the-garter, and Leap-frog. At the sound

Of footsteps he began to straighten himself;

His head rolled under his cape like a tortoise's;

He took an unlit pipe out of his mouth

Politely ere I wished him "A Happy New Year,"

And with his head cast upward sideways muttered --

So far as I could hear through the trees' roar --

"Happy New Year, and may it come fastish, too,"

While I strode by and he turned to raking leaves.

The quiet amusement of this poem may take on an additional quality of sorrow from the fact that Edward Thomas did not see many years. He died in World War I. He was a close friend of Robert Frost, who addresses him as "brother" in the poem "To E.T."

The country encounter, the mild drollery of "far less like a man than/His wheel-barrow in profile was like a pig," the lucid presentation of weather and natural setting, all recall Frost. So, too, does the resumption of a chore at the end of the poem. The return to the business of raking makes a satisfying return to work after a foray first into imagination with the bizarre image of "a tripod of a man," and then into the ordinary, conventional comforts of social life in the repeated phrase "Happy New Year."

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2008/01/03/AR2008010303154_...

>1 TheresaWilliams: As we were driving back home from the in-laws on Christmas Day, our local public radio station played a recording of Truman Capote reading A Christmas Memory. I had never read or heard the story - it was a great story, and Capote does a wonderful job of telling it.

Actually, if you click on the link below, then go to the right-hand side of the web page under "Audio" and click on Midday Christmas Stories Hour 1, you can listen - it's the first story in the hour. I also see David Sedaris's "Six to Eight Black Men" is in hour two - if you've never heard it, it's hilarious.

http://minnesota.publicradio.org/display/web/2006/12/22/middayxmas06/

Remembering that songs transmit stories also, I would like to submit Joni Mitchell's lyrics to "River" (performed by the Indigo Girls in my iTunes) I was just listening to it today. What a sad/beautiful song, what a sad/beautiful story:

Words and Music: Joni Mitchell
Lyrics found at www.mp3lyrics.org/5YZ

It's coming on Christmas they're cutting down trees
Putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

But it don't snow here it stays pretty green
I'm gonna make a lot of money then I'm
gonna quit this crazy scene
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so wide
Teach my feet to fly
I wish I had a river to skate away on

'Cause I made my baby cry

You tried hard to help me and you put me at ease
Then loved me so naughty made me week in my knees
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I'm so hard to handle I'm selfish and I'm sad
Now I lost the best baby that I ever had
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I wish I had a river so wide
Teach my feet to fly
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

'Cause I made my baby say goodbye

It's coming on Christmas they're cutting down trees
Putting up reindeer and singing songs of joy and peace
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

God I wish I had a river so wide
Teach my feet to fly
I wish I had a river I could skate away on

I've loved that song since I first heard it. Seems like it's all about that bind life puts us in - we have to be selfish, to at least an extent, or we lose ourselves, lose our sense of meaning and joy in life. And yet we run a real risk when we don't accommodate other people. And so sometimes we would just like to escape the whole burden of constantly weighing how much to be selfish and how much to accommodate. I'm trying to learn to be more selfish, but it's hard.