Ririro.com - Short Stories

"A Country Christmas" draws Sophie Vaughan — a fashionable city woman weighing a loveless millionaire's proposal — to her aunt's Vermont farmhouse for an old-fashioned holiday. She invites novelist Randal and friend Emily, expecting a charming rustic diversion. What unfolds is sharper than anyone anticipates: blunt farmhouse wisdom cuts through polished pretension, a wartime story told by quiet gi...

"Hoodoo McFiggin's Christmas" is a short comic story about a devout, generous boy who spends all his pocket money on gifts for his parents and leaves his own Christmas fortune entirely to Santa Claus — praying for skates, a puppy, a bicycle, and more. What arrives instead is a tooth-brush, celluloid collars, sensible boots, short pants, and a family Bible. Leacock's sharp satirical eye turns each...

"Merry Christmas" by Stephen Leacock opens with Father Time interrupting a writer's late-night struggle to craft a Christmas story worth telling in wartime. When Father Time beckons Father Christmas in from the dark street, a figure appears — tattered, frightened, flinching at the sound of passing cars as if they were guns. Once jolly and certain of his welcome, Father Christmas now carries rain-s...

An Unfinished Christmas Story humorously begins as a classic Christmas tale about Harry Stickney, a lonely young clerk spending Christmas Eve in New York with little money and no family nearby. The narrator introduces the eccentric landlady Mrs. Kannon and hints at a heartwarming holiday story to come—but the manuscript abruptly ends just as the plot is beginning. The joke is that the “Christmas s...

A Hint for Next Christmas is a humorous essay arguing that Christmas gifts should be standardized in size and value, especially for house guests who must carry presents home. The narrator mocks impractical gifts, praises a friend's clever trick for giving presents he never bought, and suggests that Christmas cards should be reserved for old friends with whom we have lost touch. Beneath the humor i...

"The Christmas Present" is a short story by Richmal Crompton about Mary Clay, a reserved woman worn thin by ten years of marriage to a loud, demanding husband. When a Christmas visit to her deaf aunt takes an unexpected turn, Mary is offered something extraordinary — a secret passed down through three generations of women in her family. What begins as a bleak winter scene becomes a quiet, charged...

Bertie’s Christmas Eve is a humorous story about Bertie Steffink, a mischievous young man who resents being sent away. On Christmas Eve, when his family goes to the cow-house hoping to hear animals speak at midnight, Bertie locks them inside and spends the evening entertaining a group of rowdy strangers in the house. After causing maximum chaos and embarrassment, he finally lets his family out. Th...

Reginald on Christmas Presents is a witty satire in which Reginald complains about the art of gift-giving. He mocks relatives and friends who give impractical or unwanted presents and argues that people should put more thought into what others actually enjoy. Despite claiming to be easy to please, he insists there is one gift he absolutely does not want: a “George, Prince of Wales” Prayer-book. Th...

"What the Bell Saw and Said" is a short story by Louisa M. Alcott set at midnight on Christmas Eve, where six ancient bell spirits gather in a city steeple to deliver their annual reports on humanity. Each spirit presides over a different parish and social class, bearing witness to merchant dishonesty, fashionable excess, and grinding poverty — including the heartbreaking fate of a young seamstres...

"Cousin Tribulation's Story" is a short story by Louisa May Alcott drawn from a real New Year's morning in her childhood. When their mother arrives at the breakfast table with news of a freezing, starving family nearby, four young sisters must decide whether to give up their hot porridge and bread. One girl quietly wrestles with selfishness while another immediately offers her most treasured jar o...

"A Stolen Christmas" follows Marg'ret Poole, a fiercely proud but impoverished grandmother raising three young grandchildren alone in a small New England village. With no money for gifts and no letter arriving from their struggling father, she watches the Christmas store displays day after day, fingering toys she cannot afford. On Christmas Eve, temptation overwhelms her lifelong honesty and she s...

Whistling Dick's Christmas Stocking follows a cheerful, whistling vagrant navigating the streets and levees of New Orleans on Christmas Eve, only to be ordered out of the city by a friendly policeman. Drifting into the Louisiana plantation country, Dick falls in with a gang of hardened tramps plotting a dangerous robbery — and finds himself held at gunpoint when he refuses to take part. With only...

Christmas by Injunction tells the story of Cherokee, a generous prospector who returns to his old mining town with gifts and a Christmas tree for local children, only to discover there are none. After a town-wide search, only one lonely boy is found. Cherokee then realizes the boy is the son of a woman he once loved and quietly takes him home for Christmas. The story celebrates generosity, redempt...

A Chaparral Christmas Gift tells the story of the Frio Kid, a notorious outlaw who seeks revenge on the man who married the woman he loved. On Christmas Eve, after hearing that she still believes there is good in him, he abandons his plan and instead secretly brings Christmas cheer disguised as Santa Claus. Soon after, he is killed, leaving behind one final act of kindness that reveals the humanit...

Reginald's Christmas Revel is a short story in which Saki's irrepressible narrator recounts a nightmarish Christmas stay with the dreary Babwolds — a humourless hostess, a boorish Major who cannot stop measuring his hunting trophies, and evenings filled with excruciating parlour games. Reginald endures it all with languid wit, slipping away to play wineglass skittles with the page-boy and staging...

"Uncle Richard's New Year Dinner" is a short story by L.M. Montgomery about Prissy Baker, a young woman who secretly cooks a holiday meal for the uncle who hasn't spoken to her family in eight years. Armed with nothing but a warm stove and quiet courage, Prissy slips into his empty house hoping to leave before he returns. When Uncle Richard walks in early, the awkward confrontation becomes somethi...

"Christmas Jenny" follows Jenny Wrayne, a weathered mountain woman who descends each December laden with evergreen wreaths and a fierce, unspoken tenderness for the forgotten. She shelters injured birds, field-mice, and a deaf-mute boy the poorhouse couldn't place — and when village gossip draws two men to her door, it falls to a small, trembling neighbor to defend her. Freeman builds a world of i...

"The Heavenly Christmas Tree" by Fyodor Dostoyevsky follows a small boy, no older than six, who wakes alone in a frozen cellar on Christmas Eve beside his mother's lifeless body. Wandering the glittering, indifferent streets of a grand city, he presses his face against bright windows where other children laugh, eat, and dance — a world utterly closed to him. Dostoyevsky builds unbearable tension b...

"Keeping Christmas" is a short prose meditation by Henry van Dyke that asks a quietly urgent question: what does it really mean to observe Christmas beyond the marking of a day? Through a series of searching questions, the piece challenges readers to shift their gaze from what the world owes them to what they owe the world — to consider the hungry hearts behind familiar faces, the loneliness of th...

"Vanka" is a short story by Anton Chekhov following nine-year-old Vanka Zhukov, a orphaned apprentice enduring brutal conditions in a Moscow shoemaker's workshop on Christmas Eve. Hungry, beaten, and desperate, Vanka secretly writes a letter to his beloved grandfather begging to be rescued from his misery. As he writes, vivid memories of village life, winter forests, and his grandfather's warmth f...

"A Christmas Sermon" by Robert Louis Stevenson opens not with festive cheer but with a searching question: what have we truly made of our time? Delivered in four meditative movements, the essay challenges readers to measure their lives not by grand moral victories but by small, daily acts of kindness and honesty. Stevenson argues that cheerfulness is a higher duty than rigid morality, that failure...

"Christmas" by Washington Irving is a reflective essay in which Irving mourns the slow disappearance of England's rich holiday traditions while celebrating what endures. Writing as a wistful outsider, he conjures roaring hearth fires, carol-filled manor halls, and the feudal generosity that once drew peasant and peer together under one roof. Against the cold and darkness of winter, he argues, huma...

Papa Panov's Special Christmas follows Martuin Avdyéitch, an aging shoemaker whose grief over his son's death has left him hollow — until a stranger's words and a night spent reading the Gospels reignite his faith. On Christmas Day, after a dream in which a voice promises to visit him, Martuin watches his window with quiet anticipation. One by one, a cold old laborer, a destitute mother and her in...

"The Burglar's Christmas" follows a penniless, starving 24-year-old on Christmas Eve in Chicago, who has spent years drifting through failed ventures and hollow pleasures. Cornered by hunger and despair, he slips into a stranger's home to steal — only to discover something that shatters him entirely. The story builds quietly toward a moment of raw emotional collision between a son who has given up...

Where Love Is There God Is Also tells the story of Martuin Avdyeitch, an elderly shoemaker who loses his wife and only son and falls into despair. After reading the teachings of Jesus, he learns to live for God and regains hope. One day, he dreams that Christ will visit him. As he waits, he welcomes and helps several needy people: an old laborer, a poor mother with her baby, and a boy caught steal...