2 christmas stories
Nostalgic or unsentimental, Brooklyn or Wales... Here's two completely different, yet both classic Christmas stories.
There's the mythical, long-gone Christmas of Dylan Thomas' 'A Child's Christmas in Wales' (1955), which starts:
One Christmas was so much like another, in those years around the sea-town corner now and out of all sound except the distant speaking of the voices I sometimes hear a moment before sleep, that I can never remember whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve or whether it snowed for twelve days and twelve nights when I was six.
Audio version of Thomas reading the story here.
Or Paul Auster's postmodern 'Auggie Wren's Christmas Story' (1990), as recounted in 'Smoke'.
I spent the next several days in despair, warring with the ghosts of Dickens, O. Henry, and other masters of the Yuletide spirit. The very phrase "Christmas story" had unpleasant associations for me, evoking dreadful outpourings of hypocritical mush and treacle. Even at their best, Christmas stories were no more than wish-fulfillment dreams, fairy tales for adults, and I'd be damned if I'd ever allowed myself to write something like that. And yet, how could anyone propose to write an unsentimental Christmas story?
Audio version of Auster reading the story here (excuse the ads).