One of my favorite “Christmas adjacent” stories is by the late German author Heinrich Böll. (My son and I get a kick out of the descriptor “Christmas adjacent” in referring to movies which are set at the holidays but which are not solely focused on Christmas, such as our viewing preference “Die Hard.”) Heinrich Böll’s story “And there was the evening and then the morning…,” published in 1966 in his collection 18 Stories, has to do with love and forgiveness. The story is set at Christmas. The aspect of gift giving plays a role though a great deal of the story is nonetheless “Christmas adjacent.”
Heinrich Böll won the Nobel prize for literature in 1972 and is considered one of Germany’s finest post World War II writers. He was born into a pacifist Roman Catholic family and refused to join the Hitler Youth in the 1930s. He fought in the war and afterwards married and had a family and worked various jobs. He took the plunge into full-time writing when he was thirty and went on to become an acclaimed novelist, short story writer, essayist, and writer of radio plays.
Here is a lovely Wikipedia description of his work:
Despite the variety of themes and content in his work, there are certain recurring patterns: many of his novels and stories describe intimate and personal life struggling to sustain itself against the wider background of war, terrorism, political divisions, and profound economic and social transition. In a number of his books there are protagonists who are stubborn and eccentric individualists opposed to the mechanisms of the state or of public institutions.
I want to excerpt from the very short story “And there was the evening and then the morning…” I will leave the heart of the story out for the curious to pursue. Heinrich Böll’s 18 Stories is available, used, via online merchants and so maybe you would like to read the whole thing. I looked for it on Project Gutenberg, but no dice. So here, I will simply excerpt a small passage, so flawless in ironic tone and meticulous observation. It applies to the turning of the season and our final celebration of the year.
…[Brenig] walked slowly across the square…and looked in a store window where the window dressers were exchanging Santa Clauses and angels for other dummies: ladies in décolleté, their bare shoulders sprinkled with confetti, their wrists festooned with paper streamers. Their escorts, male dummies with graying temples, were being hurriedly placed on barstools, champagne corks scattered on the floor, one dummy was having its wings and curls taken off, and Brenig was surprised how quickly an angel could be turned into a bartender…
Another “old story” is told in the form of a novel by the late William Maxwell – prolific writer, fiction editor at The New Yorker, legendary mentor. It is called They Came Like Swallows. It is set at the time of The Spanish Flu and was published in 1937. Just like the work of Heinrich Böll, the work of William Maxwell continues to ring out so strongly in our times. It is simply gorgeous and gripping. (I apologize for this tasteless alliteration.) I studied it carefully in graduate school, analyzed it for my thesis, and prayed some aspect of it would rub off on me. I hope to unearth it among my books to read it yet again as we turn to a new year in which old stories have much to say.