Happy Holidays!

As usual, we mark the holiday with some short fiction appropriate for the occasion. Here is John Cheever's "Christmas Is A Sad Season For the Poor," (which is hardly a sad story, it should be pointed out.)

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York, I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one.

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