Our Favorite Short Stories and Poems to Read This Holiday Season

In the final weeks of the year, there’s no better feeling than getting cozy and delving into your winter reading. It’s the perfect time to revisit old favorites and discover new ones along the way!  Fortunately, Electric Literature has a wealth of festive work—our archive includes holiday-themed reading lists, reviews, and even a handy chart that you can use to craft your own merry adventure. 

Amidst so much wintry spirit, the holiday story holds a special place. It’s a time honored tradition, delivering family drama, unexpected generosity, and tinsel-laden tension, all set against a snowy backdrop. 

This year, we’re collecting our favorite holiday stories from Recommended Reading and The Commuter to bring you a cozy, winter-themed lineup of short fiction for the last days of December. These pieces resonate for their alternating specificity and familiarity, for their ability to interweave the warmth and wrath, contention and communal celebrations, gratitude and familial dissolution that characterize this time of year. These stories manage to capture the holidays without falling into Hallmark cliches (not that there’s anything wrong with indulging in a Hallmark movie every now and then). 

“Another Christmas” by William Trevor

“Another Christmas” places us in the warm, rustic home of older Irish Catholic couple Norah and Dermot, and then shows us the hidden tension—strung up like so many ornaments—within their home. The couple discusses their friend and landlord Mr. Joyce, disagreeing about whether or not he’ll come for Christmas after an argument the year before. As the conversation escalates, the story presents Christmas as a stage upon which to examine our values and allegiances, political inclinations and resentments, and the role of empathy—or its absence—in affecting our long term relationships. By the end of the story, the inviting setting remains the same, but Norah’s feelings for her husband have shifted irrevocably. 

“Charades” by Lorrie Moore

“Charades” carries all the hallmarks (pun intended) of a Lorrie Moore classic: dynamic characters, relational acuity, and, of course, the humorous absurdity of daily life. The story zooms in on a family gathered together for the holidays; the titular “charades” is a reference both the game itself (which takes center stage) and the antics that develop around Moore’s idiosyncratic cast of characters. As recommender Susan Minot puts, “The large and profound is forever appearing alongside the trivial and the small, i.e., as it does in life.” 

“Iceland” by Drew Nelles

Drew Nelles’s “Iceland” takes place during the “perineum of the year”: that stretch of listless, empty days after Christmas and before New Years, which, depending on one’s outlook, can be either stifling or reassuring. The narrator of “Iceland” is spending those days in New Jersey with his father, contemplating the collapse of a friendship and the absence of his mother and sister. Although he’s initially discomfited by all the unburdened time, the story chronicles a shift in his perspective. “Iceland” captures not only the restlessness of this particular stretch of the year, but the excitement it inspires; the hope for change that lies just around the corner.  

“Charity” by Cara Blue Adams

“Charity” follows Kate, a college freshman who is home with her mother and sister for the holidays. This is the kind of holiday story that revels in familial dysfunction: as they get deeper into the festive season, Kate must act as the mediator between her mother and her other relatives, all while sustaining her nine-year-old sister’s innocent excitement. As recommender Kirstin Valdez Quade observes, “Adams captures the precarity of this family gathering: the determined festivity, the barbed ritual of gift-giving, the way tiny hurts swell and even kindness can sting. And running beneath every prickly interaction is the love these difficult people feel for one another.”

“The Little Restaurant Near Place Des Ternes” by Georges Simenon

In her introduction to “The Little Restaurant Near Place des Ternes,” recommender Jessica Harrison draws a distinction between two kinds of Christmas stories: the “glorious narrative of redemption” à la Dickens and Truman Capote, and the more stark, unforgiving portrayal of the holiday season. Harrison places Simenon’s tale in the latter category, the kind of tale “in which want, greed and loneliness are the dark twins of the season’s comfort and joy.” On a dreary, snowless day, an inspector shows up to investigate a death at the restaurant, and must piece together what happened through a cast of unreliable witnesses. With characters that defy their festive archetypes, Simenon’s story begins to resemble a murder mystery. And yet, the familiar themes of redemption and generosity are still at work in this sparse, brutal piece, surfacing unexpectedly in the story’s resolution. 

“A Bone for Christmas” by Genevieve Plunkett

Genevieve Plunkett’s “A Bone for Christmas” is haunted by the specter of winter. The story follows Petra, who arrives to conduct a wellness check on an elderly woman and ponders the instabilities in her own life–particularly her tortured husband and sensitive, curious son. For Petra’s son, Christmas is a force of anticipation. He’s fixated on the next and the next, unable to consider or appreciate the present. With tonal unease and a stark, wintry setting that harkens to Shirley Jackson, the story contends with the intimacy of the home, the expectations that arise through place, and the patterns of thought we develop to cope with life’s unsettling moments.

“We Live In a Tree for One Month Every Year” by Reina Hardy

“We Live in a Tree for One Month Every Year” is a graphic narrative from the POV of a boxful of Christmas tree decorations. Accompanied by whimsical illustrations from Sara Lautman, Hardy’s language rings with excitement, rendering the delightful, purposeful logic of the ornaments and their “feeling of being all lit up and beribboned and becoming a world ruled by an angel!” The resolution here is bittersweet; a reminder—like every holiday season—that we’re in store for another ending.

“Please Bless Us, Colonel Sanders” by Stine An

The first poem in this set from TC contributor Stine An doesn’t mention the holidays directly. Instead, it renders frenetic warmth, the revitalization that can arise while sharing a meal with family. An’s family isn’t sitting around a hearth feasting on roast turkey, they’re crowded into a green four door pontiac eating fried chicken. Somehow, this claustrophobic little world captures the holiday spirit best; the peculiar traditions and rituals we develop alongside the people we love.