Ririro.com - Short Stories

Tom Smithers's Christmas-Day follows a young barrister who finds himself penniless and uninvited on Christmas Day, forced to seek dinner through sheer nerve. Desperate, he gate-crashes the grand Tipton household, only to find a family gathering of icy formality, cold glances, and suffocating social pretension. Every attempt at warmth dies in that magnificent, freezing drawing room. What Tom really...

"The Only Man Left in College on Christmas-Day" follows Charley, an Oxford student who vows to sacrifice the holidays for serious study — only to watch his two companions desert him one by one on Christmas Eve and Christmas morning. Alone in the vast, lamp-lit dining hall with a plum-pudding decorated with holly and a sulky scout, Charley wages a losing battle against loneliness, nostalgia, and th...

"Christmas Day in Siam" recounts a remarkable Christmas celebration in Bangkok in 1840, where Prince Chou-Faa hosted every European in the city for a day of music, games, and feasting. The narrator describes thirty Englishmen attempting Highland flings in a royal courtyard, watching Siamese men play shuttlecock with breathtaking foot agility, enduring a chaotic Chinese theatrical siege, and finall...

"The Christmas Hearth" follows the Reverend Lawrence Ingleby, cast off by his proud father Sir Marmaduke for marrying a farmer's daughter and taking a meager curacy in a bleak northern parish. Sustained by his warm wife Carry and their sharp-eyed son Frederick, Lawrence endures years of poverty and silence. When Frederick grows up to become a barrister and unknowingly defends his estranged grandfa...

"Mistress Merciless" is a lyrical short story of a beloved little girl whose gentle reign over all hearts earns her a name both playful and tender. In a beautiful garden she befriends a lame boy called Master Sweetheart, who speaks of a distant land called Ever-Plaisance with quiet certainty, as though his journey there is nearly complete. Between bird rescues, a battered doll, and a nightly bedti...

"A Christmas Legend" by Vernon Lee follows Hilarion, a poor servant of upright heart, who volunteers to live alone in a haunted forest clearing where his master's family fled in terror. Night after night he hears angelic voices and sees heavenly light, yet holds firm in faith. Into this strange wood come a venerable king seeking one wiser than himself, and a beautiful princess seeking one more bea...

"But Once a Year" is a quietly affecting short story set against the bustle of Christmas Eve in a city. A shabby, isolated woman catches the eye of a glamorous young stranger outside a shop window — a fleeting moment of human warmth in an otherwise grey existence. When the stranger unexpectedly follows her home and buys her worn old fur piece, something shifts in the woman's world. What follows is...

"Three Christmas Trees" follows a imaginative young boy in a colonial town who misses a grand Christmas party after falling ill as a makeshift snowman. In his feverish bed, he glimpses a vision of the spruce fir outside his window transformed into a glittering Christmas tree, complete with candles, gifts, and a radiant Angel. The story spans his entire life — his marriage, his children, his old ag...

The Legend of King Wenceslaus opens on a bitter winter night as a king watches a poor swineherd scraping frozen branches from a hillside bush. Refusing to send servants in his place, Wenceslaus loads firewood onto his own shoulders and sets out across snow-covered moors with his young page, Otto. As the cold becomes unbearable and Otto falters, the king offers an extraordinary promise — that warmt...

"The Three Low Masses" by Alphonse Daudet follows Dom Balaguère, a greedy chaplain whose mind fills with visions of truffled turkeys and fine wines as he rushes through three Christmas Masses on Christmas Eve. Tempted by a devilish altar boy who may not be what he seems, the priest cuts corners with alarming speed, skipping prayers and entire passages to reach the castle supper faster. What unfold...

"The Poet's Christmas Eve" opens with a seven-year-old Pedro staying up late for the first time on Christmas Eve, gathered with three generations of family around a roaring fire in an Andalusian village. A grandmother's mournful couplet — "Christmas comes, Christmas goes; but soon we all shall be of those who come back — never!" — cracks the child's heart open with a sudden, devastating awareness...

"Salvette and Bernadou" is a poignant short story set on Christmas Eve 1870 in a Bavarian military hospital, where two wounded French soldiers from Provence cling to the rituals of home. Bernadou grows weaker by the day, his longing for the warmth of a Provençal Christmas more vivid than any hope of recovery. His comrade Salvette secretly sacrifices their last forty francs — money saved for the jo...

"Solange, the Wolf-Girl" is a gripping short story set in a snow-locked French forest on Christmas Eve, where a young woman named Solange faces a pack of wolves to protect her injured lover, Laurent. Forbidden by her parents to see the penniless foundling she has loved since childhood, Solange defies every danger to keep their secret meetings — until a broken leg, a dark forest, and a circling wol...

"A Christmas Supper in the Marais" follows M. Majesté, a seltzer-water manufacturer who returns home late on Christmas night to his factory — housed in the ancient Hôtel de Nesmond in Paris. On the moonlit landing he wonders idly whether the noble Nesmond family might one day return, and at that very moment the bell rings. Coaches, sedan-chairs, powdered wigs, and laughing aristocratic ghosts floo...

"The Louis-d'Or" by François Coppée follows Lucien de Hem, a young Parisian who loses his last franc at the roulette table on Christmas Eve. Walking home through snow-blanketed streets, he discovers a sleeping street child with a gold coin tucked in her slipper — placed there by a stranger honouring the old Christmas custom. Seized by desperate temptation, Lucien steals it to gamble one last time....

"Cousin Jane's Mistake" follows the ripple effects of a simple Christmas gift mix-up, when elderly Cousin Jane accidentally swaps two parcels — sending a pearl ring to a proud but struggling schoolgirl, Martha, and a silk work-bag embroidered with proverbs to the comfortable, gently idle Mary Rutherford. Neither girl receives what was intended, yet both are quietly transformed. Martha finds unexpe...

"Seasonable Festivities" unfolds as a middle-aged narrator, comfortably settled by his Christmas fire, slips into a drowsy reverie that carries him across a lifetime of holiday memories. From dazzling childhood parties with flour-dusted faces and snapdragon flames, through tender recollections of a beloved mother and boisterous schoolboy pranks, to a courtship in a snow-swept French seaside town w...

"A Great Tree" by Zona Gale follows Calliope Marsh, a quietly determined woman in Friendship Village who grows restless with the way Christmas is parcelled out — into separate churches, private families, and competing ward schools. Driven by a vision of something larger, she persuades shopkeepers to close early, coaxes rival Sunday-school superintendents to cooperate, and rallies her neighbours ar...

"The Christmas Dinner" by Washington Irving immerses readers in a grand old English Christmas feast at the Bracebridge estate, where the squire passionately revives ancient customs — from the ceremonial boar's head and the Wassail Bowl to ghost stories by the fireplace and a spontaneous Christmas mummery. The narrator observes with warm curiosity as generations mingle over candlelit silver, carols...

"Debussy Variations on a Mendelssohn Theme" follows David Pearson, a self-satisfied bachelor spending Christmas Eve alone at his club while carol singers drift up from the street below. Each song triggers a memory of a different woman — Julia, Esther, Clara, Maybelle, Alice, Helena, Margaret — and a different Christmas romance that ended with the same refrain. Banlett builds his comic structure wi...

"Christmas Day" by Washington Irving immerses readers in a richly detailed English country Christmas, as the narrator wakes to children singing carols outside his door and joins the Bracebridge household for morning prayers, a lively church service, and open-hearted village festivities. Through the squire's warmhearted hospitality, a bumbling but earnest church choir, a pedantic parson lost in Pur...

"A Random Shot" follows Nan, Vivian, Clara, and young Lillian — four sisters scraping through poverty in San Francisco just before Christmas. When twelve-year-old Lil hatches the idea of running their ailing washerwoman's neighbourhood shop as a Christmas store, the family throws itself into the venture with desperate hope and surprising good cheer. A mysterious, free-spending older gentleman beco...

"President for One Hour" puts fifteen-year-old Tom Martin at the centre of a Christmas Eve crisis on the railway. When a runaway engine barrels down a fog-covered grade toward a packed holiday passenger train, Tom is the only person in the telegraph office with the skill — and nerve — to act. Impersonating the railroad president, he reroutes trains by wire, then does the unthinkable: he boards the...

"Merry Christmas in the Tenements" by Jacob A. Riis walks through the crowded streets, basement rooms, and dim attic homes of late 19th-century New York, revealing how immigrant and impoverished communities celebrate Christmas against impossible odds. A mother drunk beside a flickering tree, Italian villagers honoring their patron saint in a cramped attic, blind Jennie singing hymns to neighborhoo...

"The Holly-Tree" follows a lovelorn, bashful narrator who, convinced his best friend has stolen his beloved Angela, boards a coach for Liverpool and America — only to be stranded by a blizzard at a Yorkshire inn. Marooned for a week, he fills his solitude with vivid memories of inns across England and Europe, then is charmed by his boots-boy's tale of two children — aged seven and eight — who sole...