Christmas Story
My personal favorite of all the stories set at Christmastime has to be James Joyce’s The Dead (also available with notes). The movie is also excellent, and someone’s thinking about producing a DVD, if there’s enough interest. Yes, technically it’s set on the Epiphany, but I don’t really want to make a mathematical post today, so you get it now. Besides, unless you’re a Joyce fan or a turn-of-the-(last)-century historian you would likely not notice.
I love the language, as I do in all of Joyce’s works. The fine details describe an Epiphany party from 1904 so thoroughly that you could easily see yourself there, but without feeling overloaded with facts like in a work of Don DeLillo or David Foster Wallace. The closing paragraph is one of the most starkly beautiful, evocative passages in the English corpus:
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