BY CONNIE WILLIS

I LOVE CHRISTMAS. I never complain about the crush at the mall or the stores starting to decorate before Halloween—or Labor Day—or having to buy presents. I like buying presents and going caroling and watching Love Actually and White Christmas. I like bubble lights and snow and Starbucks eggnog lattes—pretty much everything about the holiday season, in fact, except fruitcake and saccharine Hallmark TV movies.

And among all the things I love about Christmas, one of the best is its stories. Even though I’m primarily known for science fiction, I’ve written nearly a score of Christmas stories and novellas, and one of my family’s treasured traditions is reading our favorite stories aloud, Valentine Davies’s novelization of Miracle on 34th Street every night at dinner through Advent and George V. Higgins’s “The Impossible Snowsuit of Christmas Past” on Christmas Eve while sitting in front of the fire.

The first time my daughter saw The Muppet Christmas Carol, she raced home from the movie theater to read Dickens’s novella to her younger cousins, and I still spend way too much of December reading Dickens’s The Chimes and Jean Shepherd’s A Christmas Story and David Sedaris, and, as I clean up the post-holiday mess and face the bleak despairs of January, W. H. Auden’s “For the Time Being.”

Many of the stories my family and I have read are American stories, though I never really thought about it—Christmas is such a universal holiday—and when I was asked to help edit this collection, I had to look up the nationality of many of the authors. (I’d thought Christopher Morley was British and was convinced Saki was American.)

I’d also never thought about the history of the American Christmas story, and how it had come to exist, which turned out to be a fascinating story in itself.

Neither the Pilgrims nor the Puritans approved of Christmas, that pagan, Papist, raucous holiday, and by 1659, they’d outlawed Christmas and imposed a fine of five shillings for anyone caught celebrating it. Even worse, as relations between the colonists and the British deteriorated and the Revolutionary War approached, what little of Christmas there was, was deemed an English holiday and therefore unpatriotic. Not at all a promising beginning, and certainly nothing to write stories about.

Nevertheless, as they say, Christmas persisted, thanks largely to immigrants from Germany, the Netherlands, Central Europe, and Scandinavia who were coming to the colonies (and then the newly formed United States), bringing their Christmas traditions from back home with them—the Dutch custom of hanging up stockings, the German Christmas tree, the Moravian Christmas star, midnight mass and mistletoe and cookies and Father Christmas, all of which began working their way into the American observance of Christmas and then into American stories. Early American holiday stories by Washington Irving and Nathaniel Hawthorne were basically accounts of English Christmases transplanted to New York and New England, but as the holiday evolved, so did the stories.

In 1812, when Washington Irving wrote the revised and expanded second edition of his History of New York, he added two wholly new passages describing Saint Nicholas “riding jollily among the tree tops, or over the roofs of the houses” in a wagon, dropping presents for children down chimneys, smoking a pipe, and “laying his finger beside his nose.” In 1823 an anonymous poem titled “A Visit from St. Nicholas,” more commonly known as “The Night Before Christmas,” appeared in the Troy, New York, Sentinel. Clement C. Moore later claimed authorship, though a compelling case has been made that the author was actually Major Henry Livingston, Jr., a good friend of Washington Irving’s.

Whoever wrote it, the poem repeated Irving’s mention of the pipe, flying vehicle (now a sleigh), and children’s gifts, and added other details—reindeer, a sack full of toys, and “visions of sugarplums,” though no one then nor since has ever had a clear idea of what exactly a sugarplum is.

“The Night before Christmas,” along with tales about Christmas festivities in England in Irving’s Sketch Book (1819–20) and accounts of American Christmases by Hawthorne, James Fenimore Cooper, and, later, Harriet Beecher Stowe, began to shape the image of a distinctly American holiday, though American Christmas stories remained thin on the ground for most of the first half of the nineteenth century.

Then, in the 1860s, three pivotal things happened. The first was the Civil War, which separated three million men and boys from their homes and brought grief and loss to the families of more than six hundred thousand of them. To the soldiers, Christmas became a treasured memory, and to the people back home, a time of remembering loved ones far away from home and longing for when the family could celebrate the holiday together again. The first chapter of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, with its loving portrayal of a wartime Christmas—the girls’ father away at the front and the family suffering deprivation but cheerfully making the best of things—is a perfect example of the feelings of sadness and longing the war produced.

The second thing to happen was the appearance of a number of pictures depicting Christmas. A pair of engravers, Currier and Ives, who specialized in “engravings for the people”—inexpensive enough for the average family to own—produced a set of hand-colored prints depicting ice-skating on frozen ponds, sleigh rides through snowy landscapes, and jolly homecomings.

At the same time, Thomas Nast, a political illustrator most famous for popularizing the symbols of the Democratic donkey and the Republican elephant, began drawing a series of Civil War–themed cartoons for Harper’s Weekly that included a depiction of Santa Claus. In one of the cartoons, he showed a jolly, rotund Santa, dressed in the stars of the Union flag, delivering presents to the troops. In others he portrayed Santa riding in his sleigh and going down a chimney, and, in one of his most affecting illustrations, bringing Christmas to a praying woman and a homesick soldier separated by war. Thomas Nast’s cartoons of Santa Claus gave Christmas a face, Currier and Ives’s engravings gave it a setting, and together they brought the image of Christmas into focus for Americans.

Lastly, Charles Dickens came to the States in 1867, on a speaking tour during which he read A Christmas Carol to American audiences for the first time. Dickens was a gifted speaker with an already devoted following, but this wasn’t just any speaking tour, and A Christmas Carol wasn’t just any story. It had everything—humor, pathos, drama, redemption, unforgettable characters, and a truly happy ending. It also had ghosts, which had been a Christmas tradition since the Middle Ages, and great lines, like “Bah, humbug!” and “God bless us, every one!” It was the embodiment of everything a Christmas story should be, and Dickens’s American audiences loved it.

The coming together of A Christmas Carol, Nast’s cartoons, and Currier and Ives’s prints had the effect of touching a match to tinder. The celebrating of Christmas—and the writing about it—ignited, and soon Christmas stories by Americans were appearing everywhere. Louisa May Alcott wrote nearly a score of them, Kate Douglas Wiggins brought out a collection of Christmas tales, and so did Henry Van Dyke. Stories like “The Birds’ Christmas Carol” and “The Other Wise Man” and “The Gift of the Magi” became instant classics, and nearly every American author, from The Red Badge of Courage’s Stephen Crane to Pollyanna’s Eleanor Porter, decided to take a crack at writing one.

This was not necessarily a good thing. Many of the stories produced in the years following the Civil War were preachy, sentimental, and/or weepily tragic, and when Hans Christian Andersen came along with his “The Little Match Girl,” three-hanky stories taking “a poor girl or boy and letting them freeze somewhere under a window behind which there is usually a Christmas tree that throws its radiant splendor upon them,” as Maxim Gorky described them, became omnipresent and came close to killing off the genre altogether.

Luckily, not everyone was writing treacly tragedies. Mark Twain was looking at the more cheerful side of Christmas, William Dean Howells was laughing at its excesses, and other authors were taking a clear-eyed look at the social issues surrounding the holiday.

And the stories were no longer confined to Currier-and-Ives country. As the nation expanded, so did the stories’ landscapes. Kate Chopin wrote stories set in the South and Willa Cather the Southwest. Bret Harte told rough-edged tales of Christmas on the frontier, and Jack London set his stories in the midst of the Klondike gold rush. Author James Nicoll once said that “English doesn’t borrow from other languages; it follows them down dark alleys to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary.” The American Christmas story in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did the same thing, grabbing traditions and tales from everybody and everywhere: the farm and the city and a whole new group of immigrants, this time from Ireland, Poland, Russia, Portugal, and Italy.

In the meantime, African American authors began relating their Christmas experiences, experiences vastly different from those of white Americans and marred by racism, cruelty, and the feeling of being outsiders, stories that have expanded and enriched the American Christmas story.

By the 1920s, the Christmas story was as firmly established and as quintessentially an American tradition as the Christmas tree (stolen from Germany) and Santa Claus (swiped from the Netherlands). It was also omnipresent. Christmas stories were appearing weekly during the lengthening holiday season in Harper’s Bazaar, Vanity Fair, Women’s Home Companion, and a host of other magazines, and there was a constant demand for new stories to fill their pages.

Many of the stories were truly awful. H. L. Mencken railed against stories in which “the deserving poor” were force-fed Christmas dinner and unwanted sermons, John Kendrick Bangs’s hero struggled to come up with a story idea that hadn’t already been done to death, and Dorothy Parker complained about the ever-present “story of the snowbound train” with its Scrooge-ish millionaire and the golden-haired child who reforms and redeems him. “Words are powerless to convey the loathing I have for that story,” she said, and she was right. There were lots of them.

But there was gold amid the dross, with stories by Sherwood Anderson and Edna Ferber and Fannie Hurst. Damon Runyon’s “Three Wise Guys” was published in Collier’s and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s “A Short Trip Home” came out in The Saturday Evening Post.

Still, it was obvious new blood was needed, and anthology editors began looking for stories in less traditional venues, including pulp magazines like Weird Tales, Black Mask, True Detective, and Astounding. There they found science fiction authors examining the possibilities of time travel and considering what Christmas in the future—or in space—might be like and fantasy writers exploring the worlds of myths and fairy tales and putting new twists on the traditional Yuletide ghost story. They found horror writers delving into the frightening side of the holidays—and of the emotions they can arouse in us; mystery authors writing detective stories with Christmas settings; and authors like Mary Roberts Rinehart, Ray Bradbury, John Collier, and Arthur C. Clarke to add to the canon.

Through the ensuing decades, the Christmas story continued to evolve and expand, absorbing customs and cultures and events like the Blob. Moves to the cities and suburbs brought shifts in customs and attitudes, and stories began to be less about happy families gathered around the Christmas tree and more about drunken office parties and urban alienation. World War II revived many of the same feelings the Civil War had, and fears of the atomic bomb issued in darker, more cynical stories.

Other groups of new writers—Hispanic, Asian American, Puerto Rican—began telling their stories, and even corporations, a favorite villain in Christmas stories, had something to contribute to the holiday. Montgomery Ward created “Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer,” Coca-Cola produced an updated Santa Claus whose image was to become almost as iconic as Thomas Nast’s, and Macy’s and Gimbel’s department stores provided the settings for Miracle on 34th Street and Elf.

Today’s American Christmas is a hopelessly tangled mishmash of religious holiday, national holiday, historical holiday, and, as Ralphie in A Christmas Story, the classic movie made from Jean Shepherd’s novel In God We Trust, All Others Pay Cash, puts it, the holiday “around which the entire kid year revolved.” The American Christmas story is also becoming increasingly international, with authors like Nalo Hopkinson, who does not self-identity as an American, bringing new memories and traditions into the mix of American stories. Christmas, and the stories about it, incorporate classic traditions, ethnic customs from all over, brand new refinements, and everything from the Rockettes to regifting, from Christmas pageants to ugly sweaters, from nostalgia to existential angst. Plus: Christmas newsletters, Secret Santas, department store windows, laser yard decorations, Kwanzaa, community productions of the The Nutcracker, luminarias, e-cards, angels, and “Grandma Got Run Over by a Reindeer.” Far too much for any one short story collection—or a dozen, for that matter—to capture in its pages.

But American Christmas Stories comes as close as humanly possible to doing just that. It includes stories from the American Christmas story’s earliest years (Louisa May Alcott’s “Kate’s Choice” and J. B. Moore Bristor’s “Found After Thirty-Five Years—Lucy Marshall’s Letter”) to modern stories from disparate backgrounds and cultures (Jose R. Nieto’s “Ixchel’s Tears” and Leo Rosten’s “Mr. K*A*P*L*A*N and the Magi”) to stories from the day after tomorrow (Ray Bradbury’s “The Gift” and Raymond E. Banks’s “Christmas Trombone”).

There are stories that will make you laugh (Robert Benchley’s “Christmas Afternoon” and Thomas M. Disch’s “The Santa Claus Compromise”) and stories that will make you think (W.E.B. Du Bois’s “The Sermon in the Cradle” and Grace Paley’s “The Loudest Voice”) and stories that will make you cry (Jacob Riis’s “The Kid Hangs Up His Stocking” and Christopher Morley’s “The Tree That Didn’t Get Trimmed.”)

There are old standbys (Mark Twain’s “A Letter from Santa Claus,” William Dean Howells’s “Christmas Every Day,” and Edna Ferber’s “No Room at the Inn”) and familiar authors (Stephen Crane, Shirley Jackson, Katherine Anne Porter, and John Updike), plus some you’ve never heard of. And a couple of hidden treasures nobody’s ever heard of, like Pauline E. Hopkins’s “General Washington” and Mary Agnes Tincker’s “From the Garden of a Friend.”

My favorites? That’s hard—there are so many great stories. If I had to pick, though, I’d guess my shortlist would have to include Langston Hughes’s wistful “One Christmas Eve” and George V. Higgins’s “The Impossible Snowsuit of Christmas Past,” which perfectly captures both the nostalgia and loss which are so much a part of Chritmas, and Amy Tan’s very short piece about a different kind of Christmas dinner, which somehow manages to capture, in its few hundred words, an entire novel’s worth of cultural pressures and generation gaps. And the love that’s capable of reconciling them.

My favorite of all is probably Pete Hamill’s “The Christmas Kid.” It’s got baseball in it—and Brooklyn and World War II and a school Christmas pageant, pathos and humor and drama—and a happy ending. It embodies everything a Christmas story should be.

Just as American Christmas Stories embodies what an anthology of American Christmas stories should be. It’s a book that shows just how the modern American Christmas story came to be—and at the same time it’s a perfect candidate to read aloud from on Christmas Eve.

I hope you enjoy it as much as we’ve enjoyed putting it together. And a very merry—and very American—Christmas to all of you!

December 2020

Postscript: After the table of contents had been finalized, Library of America editors selected their favorite Christmas “novelette” by Connie Willis for inclusion in this anthology.