Christmas in the South: Holiday Stories from the South's Best Writers

Cheerful, over-achieving adults and small children seem to get a consistent bang out of the Christmas holidays, but for the lot of us, it is more like a series of days we annually, earnestly endure in the hope that our communal family peace and our individual peace of mind will be intact at the end of the year. Particularly in the South, where major portions of our landscape are never going to match the customary greeting-card depiction of a romantic ride in a one-horse open sleigh, where only a few states are ever carpeted with enough snow to build a reasonably sized snowman, we tend to anticipate Christmas with more longing than most people. And it is more than our temperate weather that has modern Southerners craving holiday perfection. As so gorgeously recounted in this collection, Christmas has become symbolic of the contemporary distance between the old ideal of the traditional, close-knit family gathering together over the holidays and becoming even closer and the newer reality of the farther-flung family separated by state rather than county lines, by socio-political ideologies, by basic values rather than trivial differences, gathering together and either forgiving or becoming more estranged.

We labor to create an ideal and then we guard it against wreckage, sometimes worrying the joy out of the season and ourselves. We want wonder and bliss and the magic of the season, and then we monitor, chastise, and control. We can create battlefields of longing, and when it's all over, we clean up and wait until next year, when we can try for perfection again. It is little wonder that a day so burdened with anticipation and dread so often fails to produce unmitigated pleasure, and that even the slightest mishaps or misdeeds, things easily ignored the rest of the year, are able to make permanent impresses on our memories. The memory treats Christmas different, assigns events a higher value; and so then, given the urgent place of memory in the work of each writer in this volume, it is understandable that each of their stories seems so naturally alive and true that the reader feels instantly let inside and shown around different homes, different worlds, variously decorated with varieties of trees, with love, loss, and longing.

These stories are opportunities for us to consider why the holidays are days we can't wait to get here or can't wait to leave, or both. They are gifts of language and memory that will compel us to regard Christmases past and wonder at the best and the worst of them. As strange as it may sound to say that one of the most beautiful aspects of the collection is the way these writers deal with loss and grief, I say it because as I read, I was washed over with what I suppose one could call nostalgia for the love of my grandfather, who died on Christmas Eve of 1965. His seven sons and daughters and all their children were gathered around his chair, watching him open presents. My mother, Shine, was sitting on his lap. Her long legs hung over his knees. My memory has him pressing his hands to his chest and dying instantly. All the children are herded upstairs by screaming aunts. I will always be grateful to my memory for eliminating any other unbearable events of that day, and I am grateful to the writers for opening the door to my grandfather's house again, where love and joy were so abundant.

I am also grateful to these writers for reminding me, quite literally, of why I love to write. The gifts of Doris Betts, Clyde Edgerton, Donald Harington, Nanci Kincaid, Carolyn Haines, Gail Godwin, Jill McCorkle, Ellen Douglas, and Larry Brown are treasures I have kept stored for use in my own work for almost twenty years. Their humor and pathos, their ability, willingness, and what Walker Percy probably would've called a "knack" for addressing the highest, most important elements of human thought and emotion-love, pride, grief, loneliness, despair, faith, gladness-in the confident and clear cadences of the vernacular, are as evident in these representative stories as in any other of their works.
Finding Eudora Welty's confluence, that place where two different ideas come together and flow as one, is what these writers do best and is what has earned them international reputations as masters of their craft. A reader in France, for example, knows that when he reads "Merry Christmas, Scotty" or any other story by Larry Brown, he is going to meet an ordinary citizen, probably of Mississippi, who is going to use his own unvarnished voice to tell him an utterly profound, extraordinary story that will leave him feeling ragged and redeemed. If these writers used the vernacular to recast only local trivialities, then they would not be great, they would not be who they are; but they are in the habit of using the voices of their particular places to examine the widest and deepest emotions we share, and that is what lifts the best writing of the South up out of this time and place. That these remarkable authors have given us stories about the miracles of love and loss at Christmas only adds another dimension to their art.

Although stylistically different, Silas House and Michael Knight both write with an uncanny grace and authority. Their particular turns of phrase and their ability to summarize the humanity or lack of humanity in a character by one swift or metaphorical movement are feats no writer ever takes for granted, no matter how long he or she has been writing. Like the other writers who have been gathered here to tell us something about the mystery of Christmas, they bring us their singular attitudes, their rich voices, and we expect and receive nothing less than magic from them. One book this full of so much glorious language may, in fact, be the closest thing to experiencing a perfect Christmas any of us find this year. The book doesn't need wrapping either, as it was wrapped around with all our voices, dreams, and wishes the moment the writers decided to give us all such magnificent gifts of their spirit.