I believe this is the third Christmas that I’ve continued reading the Christmas short stories from Everyman’s Pocket Classics.  The stories are written by well-known classic authors and each one so far has been excellent.  This is the seventh story in the compilation, written by Willa Cather, and is set on a cold Christmas Eve in the city of Chicago

Christmas Eve – John Everett Millais
~ source Wikiart

THE BURGLAR’S CHRISTMAS

It’s Christmas Eve in Chicago and two young men stumble through the streets, rumpled in their dress.  They are looking for food as its been a long while since they’ve eaten and the reader can soon surmise that they once were functioning members of society but through circumstances have fallen on hard times.

One suggests that they go to a saloon where he once played and they could perhaps get a free lunch, but the other man refuses and sets off alone with his thoughts:

“He had avoided this final reckoning with himself for a year now.  He had laughed it off and drunk it off.  But now, when all those artificial devices which are employed to turn our thoughts into other channels and shield us from ourselves had failed him, it must come.  Hunger is a powerful incentive to introspection.

It is a tragic hour, that hour when we are finally driven to reckon with ourselves, when every avenue of mental distraction has been cut off and our own life, and all its ineffaceable failure closes about us like the walls of that old torture chamber of the Inquisition. Tonight, as this man stood stranded in the streets of the city, his hour came.”

 

Place Sainte Michel Christmas – Edouard Cortes
~ source Wikiart

His thoughts drifted back to his old life, his time at college, his birthday parties as a child, especially memorable because his birthday was on this night, Christmas Eve.  Then he decides to do something that he has never done before, his last act on earth …. to become a thief.  His first attempt fails as he returns a package to a girl who had dropped it unnoticed.  However, he then saw a grand new Chicago house with people going into it and he slipped quietly inside.  Sneaking into a second room, he found riches beyond his expectations; rings, jewels, trinkets, but then what he discovered stopped him in his tracks.  A woman entered and suddenly the man’s world was changed forever.

This story is a lovely tale of lost years, unworthiness, forgiveness, redemption and love.  Cather includes a twist that the reader would never suspect and it adds such a strong emotional element that you are immediately taken in.

The next story is one by the famous short story author, O. Henry, called A Chaparral Christmas Gift.

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