AMERICAN CHRISTMAS STORIES

I have a new book out I want to tell you about. Two years ago, I was honored to be asked to help put together a collection of American Christmas stories for the Library of America. The Library of America is a highly prestigious non-profit organization that “publishes, preserves, and celebrates America’s greatest writing. ” It’s published over 300 volumes by authors ranging from Ralph Waldo Emerson to Ray Bradbury, from Frederick Douglass to Edgar Rice Burroughs and Octavia Butler, and I was thrilled to be asked to edit what turned out to be AMERICAN CHRISTMAS STORIES.

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The mission of the book was to chronicle the history of the American Christmas story from its beginnings in the mid-1800s to the present day as it grew and expanded and diversified into every genre and ethnic group and aspect of American life. To that end, we looked for stories in all sorts of places and publications.

( NOTE: Stefanie Peters and David Cloyce Smith and the other editors at Library of America did all the heavy lifting, scouring all sorts of obscure books and magazines, finding thousands of stories for us to choose from, and getting all the necessary permissions and releases. All I did was read a bunch of stories, suggest some stories they’d missed, and write the introduction.)

Between us, we found mysteries, horror stories, Westerns, science-fiction stories, ghost stories, police procedurals, and fantasies, stories by famous authors like Bret Harte and John Updike and stories by writers you’ve never heard of, like Pauline Hopkins and John Kendrick Bangs. Stories by African-American authors writing in the post-Civil War South, by Chinese-American authors writing about California’s Chinatown, by authors of vastly different backgrounds writing about Alaskan and Puerto Rican and Nebraska Christmases.

And we found stories written in all different keys, from cynicism to sentimentality, from nostalgia to urban angst. And comedy. So many Christmas collections focus solely on serious or uplifting stories, but humor’s been a staple of the American Christmas story since Mark Twain and William Dean Howells, and I was really happy we were able to include humorous stories by Shirley Jackson, Robert Benchley, Leo Rosten, Joan Didion, and Damon Runyon.

(Especially Damon Runyon. We would have included all his Christmas stories if we’d had room, and all of O. Henry’s, but alas, there were length constraints–and permissions we weren’t able to get. And in addition, we didn’t want this collection to be a carbon copy of every other Christmas anthology we’d ever read. Which is why O. Henry’s “Gift of the Magi” and the “Christmas won’t be Christmas” piece by Louisa May Alcott aren’t in the book. Sorry. But they’ve been reprinted virtually everywhere, and if we included them, we’d have had to leave out stories by both O. Henry and Alcott that you might not have read before.)

We also included lots of other wonderful stories, like Langston Hughes’ wistful “One Christmas Eve” and Edna Ferber’s “No Room at the Inn” and Ben Hecht’s “Holiday Thoughts” Jacob Riis’s “The Kid Hangs Up His Stocking” and Jack London’s “Klondike Christmas” and Dorothy Parker’s “The Christmas Magazines and the Inevitable Story of the Snowbound Train.”

For you science-fiction, fantasy, and horror fans, there’s Cynthia Felice’s “Track of a Legend,” Mildred Clingerman’s “The Wild Wood,” Steve Rasnic Tem’s “Buzz,” Ray Bradbury’s “The Gift,”and Raymond E. Banks’s “Christmas Trombone.”” (And a story of mine that they chose, “Inn.”)

I have lots of favorites in the collection–Thomas Disch’s “The Santa Claus Compromise” and Pete Hamill’s “The Christmas Kid” and W.E.B. DuBois’s “The Sermon in the Cradle”–but the two stories that I’m happiest about for being in the book are Christopher Morley’s “The Tree That Didn’t Get Trimmed,” which is probably my favorite Christmas story ever, the one that best embodies the holiday’s spirit of beauty and redemption and one which isn’t nearly well enough known, and “The Impossible Snowsuit of Christmas Past” by George V. Higgins. I’d found that story years ago in a magazine, and our family read it every year on Christmas Eve, but it had only been reprinted once and had never been anthologized, and we had the very devil of a time trying to locate it. It just wasn’t anywhere. (Thanks, you wonderful Library of American editors, for your efforts in tracking it down!) If they hadn’t succeeded in finding it and then getting permission to use it, you’d probably never have had the chance to read it, and that would have been a pity. It’s such a lovely story. As are all the other nearly-lost treasures that fill this book.

Sorry to brag, but I’m just so proud of how the book turned out and so grateful to the Library of American for having given me the chance to be involved with it.

The book is AMERICAN CHRISTMAS STORIES, The Library of America Collection, edited by Connie Willis, and it’s available pretty much everywhere in both hardback and e-book formats.

Connie Willis