Take joy this holiday season

Vladimir Nabokov’s short story “Christmas” is one of my favorite Christmas stories. A father, mourning the death of his teenage son, spends Christmas Eve at their summer manor, alone and consumed with grief. His son had collected butterflies and the father discovers a tin box in his room with a cocoon tucked in the corner. The father carries it with him into the warm sitting room. On Christmas morning, “The cocoon in the biscuit tin had burst at its tip, and a black, wrinkled creature the size of a mouse was crawling up the wall above the table. It had emerged from the chrysalid because a man overcome with grief had transferred a tin box to a warm room.” A lovely Atlas moth appears. The story was translated from the Russian and published in The New Yorker on Dec. 29, 1975.

What Nabokov manages in his writing is to bring us into the landscape, into the room with him. He describes the winter scene as “quiet as it can only be on a bright, frosty day. ...[H]e made his way among the trunks of amazingly white trees to the spot where the part dropped off toward the river. Far below, ice blocks sparkled near a hole cut in the smooth expanse of white.”

The Christmas and Hanukkah holidays, as festive and merry as they are, can be stressful. In addition to our frenetic schedules, now for a few weeks shopping, baking and cooking, entertaining, arranging travel plans and decorating is added to the daily to-do list.

On Monday evening I led a group reading “Christmas.” It seemed the perfect way to step into the holiday week. We sat in a warm room at the Center for Fiction, enjoying a White Russian cocktail. For a few hours we were with Sleptsov on that Christmas Eve. We talked of memory. The colors of winter. How a writer shapes a story. Why this story is titled “Christmas,” when written in Russian, the original title is “Birth.”

Holiday traditions stir our memories of time past and connect us with the present, while at the same time we are thinking of the new year, of what is to come. Hoping for a sense of renewal.

Thank you to each of you for reading my words throughout the year. May you enjoy good health and the enchantment that defines this season. Look around you. Find a tin box and carry it into a warm room ... take joy!

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Elizabeth Howard is the producer and host of the Short Fuse Podcast, found on Spotify, Apple Podcasts or through the Arts Fuse. Her career intersects journalism, marketing, and communications. Ned O’Gorman: A Glance Back, a book she edited, was published in May 2016. She is the author of A Day with Bonefish Joe, a children’s book, published by David R. Godine. You can send her a note at eh@elizabehthhoward.com.