Write Your Own Touching Holiday Story With Our Handy Chart

The winter holidays are a time for overindulgence, family bickering, and most importantly, saccharine but extremely effective tearjerking stories about love, forgiveness, community, family, peace on Earth, and finding a functional application for your weird nose. Sometimes these are vaguely religious, but more often they’re about the Goodness in the Human Heart and how Yes, Virginia, There Is a Santa Claus and whatnot. But after 150 or so years of the same holiday stories, we’re ready for some fresh blood, or at least some fresh milk and cookies. Thus, we are introducing a Holiday Story Generator, so you can sniff out the sentimental holiday narrative hidden within your own name. (Christmas has a real monopoly on this type of emotional manipulation, but we threw in some Chanukah ones if we thought they were funny, including a deep cut for you real Chanukah story fans.)

The aforementioned Virginia, for instance, would choose the V option from column A (“old”), I from column B (“man”), R from column C (“is a humbug”), and so forth, and plug them into the key sentence. Result: “An old man who is a humbug sees his own grave and learns humility.” (We put “their” when a personal pronoun is called for but you’re free to change it according to your protagonist’s gender.) Well heck, that’s basically the plot of “A Christmas Carol” so we know that one works! If your first name is shorter than five letters, go on to use your last—Tiny Tim, for instance, would do “Tiny T” and wind up with “an unhappy man who sells matches runs out of money and gives birth in a manger.” A true holiday miracle.