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    Home For Christmas
    Home For Christmas
    Home For Christmas
    Ebook101 pages2 hours

    Home For Christmas

    By Scott H. Young

    ()

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    About this ebook

    In this entertaining collection of short stories author Scott Young demonstrates his characteristic wit and warmth as he presents amusing and heartfelt tales about Christmas. The diverse cast of characters in this collection includes everything from Christmas-devoted kids and good Samaritans to an Angel named Blobs to Santa Claus himself in stories that will warm your heart and make you smile.

    Home for Christmas features these twelve short stories by Scott Young:

    “Once Upon a Time in Toronto”
    “Red Wagon”
    “Little Stars of Bethlehem”
    “The Second Coming of Ordinary Angel Blobs”
    “A Prarie Boy’s Christmas, 1933”
    “The Boy Who Threw a Snowball at Santa”
    “Chez Claus”
    “A Night After Christmas”
    “The Samaritan”
    “Glad Tidings from the Paper Boy”
    “The Ragtime Shoes”
    “Home for Christmas”
    “Highly Colored Christmas Scenes”
    “The 25-Cent Gift”
    “The Santa Scam”
    “Uncle Harry Makes an Ending Happy”

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherHarperCollins
    Release dateDec 10, 2013
    ISBN9781443434119
    Home For Christmas
    Author

    Scott H. Young

    Scott Young is the Wall Street Journal bestselling author of Ultralearning, a podcast host, computer programmer, and an avid reader. Since 2006, he has published weekly essays to help people learn and think better. His work has been featured in the New York Times, Pocket, and Business Insider, on the BBC, at TEDx, and other outlets. He doesn’t promise to have all the answers, just a place to start.

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      Book preview

      Home For Christmas - Scott H. Young

      Once Upon a Time in Toronto

      Once upon a time in Toronto, there was a young couple, he twenty-two and she twenty-three, who came from some distant place just a few weeks before Christmas. They found a one-room apartment in an old building on Robina Avenue, which runs north of St. Clair just past Oakwood in the west end.

      They had no furniture except a gate-leg table, a bridge table with folding chairs, and a tea-wagon that had been wedding presents when they married a few months before. The apartment had a bed that could be raised on its end and locked into place between closet doors in the morning, and let down the same way at night. When it was down, it blocked the entrance to the bathroom, but it was no trouble and even giggling fun to walk across the bed when that was the case.

      In the basement hallway of the old apartment building was a sofa whose upholstery had been painted maroon with ordinary house paint. It was waiting to be hauled away with the garbage but the woman, who had dark hair and brown eyes, got the janitor’s permission to move it into the apartment.

      The little kitchen had the only window in the place that would open. They got used to the scratch of steel wheels as the high TTC trolleys short-turned right under the window on what was called the Robina Loop. He made twenty-five dollars a week, which worked out to about twenty-two dollars after deductions. They paid thirty dollars a month for the apartment. They had about fifteen dollars a week for carfare, food and other expenses.

      That was okay until suddenly Christmas was upon them. As they were newly married, they had never had Christmas together. They bought a few cards and small presents to send away to their parents. When that was done they had nothing left from that week’s pay.

      His job was nights, from 6 P.M. to 2 A.M. He had to work on Christmas Eve. They talked about a Christmas tree but when they walked around the district trees were two dollars and up, more than they could afford.

      It didn’t bother them. They had enough in other ways. But on Christmas Eve before he caught the St. Clair car to go to work they were out for their usual afternoon walk when they found tree prices had dropped. On one lot, trees were being cleared at fifty cents.

      They looked at each other, then took a long time to choose. She wanted a small, fat tree and she found one. He borrowed a hammer and nails from the janitor and made a wooden stand from an old packing case. They had it up in late afternoon of Christmas Eve, without decorations. They put the tree in a corner by an old sizzling radiator and laid their few parcels under it, one parcel being a pipe, for him, and another a nightgown, for her, both to be surprises, of course.

      They ate at four o’clock as usual so he could get to work on time. He went off with two tuna-fish and onion sandwiches she had made for his mid-evening lunch. Snow was falling outside the streetcar windows. He could see people on the streets carrying parcels, trudging through the snow in the yellow of the street lights. Sometimes the car he was on, going downtown almost empty, would stop beside one coming the other way, loaded to the doors with people dimly seen through steamy windows, chatting, juggling parcels, all with a kind of busy Christmas Eve glow.

      That night he was not busy at his office, where he wrote wire-service stories picked up from the daily papers. All across the country, newspapers were shutting down early. He was told he could leave at midnight. There was nothing left to do. He and the people he worked with called out their Merry Christmases and he took the streetcar home. The night was very quiet as he walked through the snow the last block to the apartment. There were fewer outdoor decorations in those days, but in windows he could see outlines of decorated trees and thought, next year we’ll have decorations, too.

      When he tapped on the door and she opened it and he stepped in, he could hardly believe the look of the tree. It was hung for all of its short fatness with little rosettes made of white and red tissue paper. She had worked on it all evening, tying handfuls of leftover wrappings with white wool and clipping the ends with scissors to make them look like petals.

      When they went to bed the glow from the streetlight outside shone on the little tree. They lay there and looked at it for a while and then she said, There’s an envelope on the tree that I want you to open now. He found it and turned on a light to read it. This is our first Christmas, he read. We don’t have much except each other, but I have cut up little bits of my heart for you, to put on our first tree.

      For nearly twenty years after that, those first decorations always had a place among the grander and grander ones on their trees. And he remembers them yet, long after their marriage broke up, and knows that so does she.

      Red Wagon

      When Kip wakened that morning, he could hear his mother and father tip-toeing around at the door whispering. This was strange. Usually when he wakened there was no noise until he made it. Then he would yell, Morneen! a few times until his father, in rumpled pyjamas, with hair hanging over his half-closed eyes, would come in and carry Kip to the bathroom. His father then would stand with eyes closed. When Kip was finished, his father would return him to his crib and mumble, Go back to sleep. Then his father would disappear and no matter how much noise Kip made it was always another hour before he could get one of them up again, although often they would yell, Shut up!

      But this time there were whispers. Kip sat up carefully in his crib and listened.

      Hear anything? one whisper asked.

      No, said the other whisper. Must be still asleep.

      Just like a kid, said the first whisper. Gad. Gets up early every morning but Christmas. Kip’s father said Gad a lot.

      If he knew what was out here, he’d be up all right, said the first whisper again.

      Kip became mildly excited. This was interesting, but he couldn’t sit around all day in bed when there was the bathroom. This was important. Sometimes he didn’t make it on time.

      Morne-e-e-n! he called.

      The door opened quickly. They were standing there. His mother had washed her face, which was not usual at this time of morning. His father had combed his hair.

      They both said Merry Christmas, whatever that meant. Kip contemplated the word, or two words, whatever it was, and kept silent. He knew he’d just make a fool of himself if he tried to say it, or them, back, although that was obviously expected of him. He stood up in bed.

      Red Wagon! he commanded. Red Wagon!

      Bathroom first, said his mother.

      Gad. Wait’ll he sees that other stuff, said his father, who was smiling. This, in Kip’s experience, was unparalleled. It wasn’t that his father wasn’t a nice man. But he usually just didn’t seem happy in the morning.

      In the

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