It's beginning to feel a bit like Christmas …
The rooms were very still while the pages were softly turned and the winter sunshine crept in to touch the bright heads and serious faces with a Christmas greeting.
Louisa May Alcott
I’ve written a story for Christmas for many years now. My first one featured my eldest daughter as the ‘heroine’. She was four years old when I wrote that first story and this year celebrated her forty-first birthday.
My mother-in-law at that time was German, and so Christmas celebrations followed two customs. Christmas Eve saw our celebration of ‘German Christmas’, with a gathering of families at the home of my parents-in-law. The children would open the presents from their grandparents in the evening. But before doing so, the request of the children was that they ‘perform’ in some way. This could be a song, poem, reading, piece of music etc. The children seemed to much enjoy doing this, and it offered the calm before the frenetic storm of Christmas paper ripped from presents.
Taking that idea, I decided to write a short story and read it to my family on Christmas Day. I didn’t realise at the time that I’d started something of a tradition. And no idea that I would still be writing such stories so many years later.
That first effort was a short and straightforward tale of my young daughter attempting to stay awake on Christmas Eve to see Santa Claus. Spoiler alert, she didn’t.
Subjects have varied over the years. In the early days, they had a ‘domestic’ theme with my eldest children playing leading roles. Those roles then fell to my younger children, and on one occasion, the family cat was the star!
Stories have featured Spectres and Ghosts (always a good Christmas theme), time travel, tipsy Santa’s, tortuous journeys, the First World War, Romance, and the aftermath of drunken revelry. My favourite (though no one else seemed to like it as much as I did), was a meandering tale of a writer struggling to write a Christmas Story. Some stories are light-hearted, and some are darker, and even death has featured in a few. My audience is usually kind and sympathetic to my effort, except on one occasion when I killed off a character near the end of a love story. That drew a rude word questioning my parentage from my youngest daughter (she was eighteen at the time). Everyone’s a critic sometimes.
The stories have varied in length too. The tradition was for me to read my story on Christmas day before the opening of presents. That was fine for a tale that took only a few minutes to read. Not so fine when the story had grown in length to the point it took closer to an hour. My audience of children and adults, impatiently eyeing the presents that lay before them. I now read the story towards the end of the day after present opening and when all are replete with lunch.
Despite some of the stories being a challenge to write, they are something I much enjoy creating. If nothing else, they are a very personal present for my friends and family. It’s as if I’m giving a little bit of me to them each year. And because the stories are presents, I don’t keep copies.
This year’s story is already in the bag but not without a couple of false starts. Now retired, I thought I would have more time on my hands to write. It wasn’t time, however, but the inspiration that I lacked. I had a couple of ideas but nothing that developed, ‘in the writing’. Fortunately, a catalytic friend was on hand to offer encouragement and that vital spark. His ‘starter for ten’, words dissolved my block, and soon my fingers were dancing over the keyboard in creativity.
I won’t pretend my stories are literary classics in the style of Fitzgerald, Hemingway, or Dickens. Mine are simple tales with a Christmas theme (sometimes a very tenuous Christmas theme) written as a gift for my friends and family. They, therefore, have a minimum print run. Indeed, only a handful of copies. That will be a handful plus one this year as I have promised a copy to my ‘inspiration’ above.
On Christmas Day this year, I will again share my story with those who gather to listen. Although I suspect that this year Zoom may well play a part. As I do every year, I wonder what reaction I might receive.
Only thirty-seven more ‘sleeps’ to go!
