Ririro.com - Short Stories

"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...

"A Soldier's Christmas" follows a career officer who, invalided out of the Army just before Christmas, resolves to ignore the holiday entirely rather than face it without his regiment. Bitter, restless, and convinced his useful life is over, he is coaxed from his rooms by his cousin Alice and drawn into a warm family Christmas. Over dinner he reconnects with Ethel Meadows, a sharp-witted army woma...

"The Survivor's Story" opens on Christmas Eve, with four couples stranded by a snowstorm in a Springfield hotel, determined to make the best of it. What follows is a gleeful chain of wildly absurd tall tales — a reporter who ghostwrote Webster's most famous line, a schoolmistress who sabotaged the Confederacy through arithmetic, a governess whose pupils came to ruin — each more outrageously deadpa...

"Stand and Wait" follows Huldah Root, a devoted New England woman whose quiet, selfless service spans three Christmas seasons and two continents. From nursing a child with a fractured skull on Christmas Eve 1848, to tending wounded soldiers in a Virginia church during the Civil War, to a chance reunion in Normandy with a French soldier she once comforted, Huldah never seeks recognition — only to b...

"Christmas Waits in Boston" follows a minister's Christmas Eve sleigh ride through Boston, leading sixteen children in carols for sailors, immigrants, millionaires, and humble neighbours alike. What begins as pure festive joy grows more urgent when a stranded family needs a nurse, a merchant needs an unexpected translator, a newspaper press needs saving — and a dear friend's life hangs on a single...

"The Same Christmas in Old England and New" by Edward Everett Hale opens on Christmas Day 1620, when the Pilgrim settlers at Plymouth—led by John Carver and William Bradford—deliberately spent the holy day felling timber and laying the foundations of their first common house. Hale weaves dry wit and meticulous historical research into a vivid contrast: fifty cold, waterless outcasts building an em...

Alice's Christmas-Tree by Edward Everett Hale begins with a generous young woman's plan to host a small Christmas party for poor neighborhood children — a plan that spirals into joyful chaos and ends in tears when the evening descends into pushing, shouting, and near-riot. But after the wreck of the party, three street boys — Pat Crehore, Bill Floyd, and the rough Tom Mulligan — are quietly moved...

"Daily Bread" weaves together two families separated by twenty-five miles and a catastrophic blizzard on the eve of Christmas. In Boston, Mary and Robert Walter watch their infant Jamie cling to life, his survival entirely dependent on fresh milk that the snowstorm has cut off for days. On a farm outside the city, Huldah Stevens tends livestock alone through the storm while her husband and the oth...

"They Saw a Great Light" is a Christmas short story following Laura Cutts, a lighthouse keeper's wife on the Maine coast, who faces a brutal winter blizzard alone with her two small children on Christmas Eve. Her husband Tom and his crew have not returned from an emergency errand to the mainland, and as the storm rages through the night, Laura must keep both lighthouse lamps burning — not just as...

Markheim, a short story by Robert Louis Stevenson, opens on Christmas afternoon in a London antique dealer's shop, where a desperate man kills the dealer during a botched robbery. As Markheim searches the house for money, guilt and paranoia crowd in around him—shadows seem to move, clocks tick accusingly, and an unseen presence haunts every room. When a stranger appears and offers to help him esca...

"The Yule Log" by Jules Simon unfolds as a vivid memoir of Christmas Eve in the small Breton village of Saint-Jean-Brévelay in 1822. An elderly narrator revisits the rituals of his childhood — the blessing of the great log, the luminous midnight Mass lit by a thousand tapers, and the generous hospitality of his saintly mother. But the warmth is complicated when Marion, a young seamstress, slips we...

"A Bird in the Snow" follows Juan, a blind, destitute musician wandering the frozen streets of Madrid on Christmas Eve, surviving on pennies earned by singing while police repeatedly move him along. Stripped of his job, his possessions, and his home, Juan clings to one fragile hope: that his long-absent brother Santiago will somehow find him. The story builds a devastating tension between Juan's q...

"The Mule and the Ox" follows Celinina, a three-year-old girl who dies on Christmas Eve longing for two small nativity figures her father never managed to bring her. Galdós moves between raw parental grief — a mother undone by a headless camel, a father tormented by one unkept promise — and a luminous, tender fantasy in which Celinina's soul returns that night to claim what she was owed. The story...

"Christmas Crackers: A Fantasia" by J.H. Ewing unfolds on a Christmas Eve in an old country house, where a strange, hollow-cheeked tutor with gem-bright eyes scatters fragrant powder on the yule log. As the household pulls crackers, each person slips into a private reverie: a young man finds unexpected courage to declare his love, a parson witnesses the Star of Bethlehem, an old grandmother glimps...

Bertie's Ride follows fifteen-year-old Bertie Chetwynd, who slips away on his pony through deepening Christmas Eve snow to fetch candles for the family tree and — secretly — a letter for his lovesick Cousin Mildred. When his pony throws him and vanishes into the storm, the whole household plunges into dread. The story moves between Bertie half-frozen under a hedge, his mother's quiet terror in a h...

"A Christmas Mystery" follows three world-renowned but emotionally isolated men — physicist Sir Angus McCurdie, Assyriologist Professor Biggleswade, and empire builder Lord Doyne — who find themselves inexplicably drawn to the same remote Cornwall destination on Christmas Eve. When their motor car breaks down on a snow-covered moor, they take shelter in a desolate hovel where they encounter a dyin...

"Christmas with the Baron" follows the miserly Baron von Schrochslofsleschshoffinger, a tyrant who squeezes his starving tenants dry while blocking his daughter Bertha's romance with a young artist. On Christmas Eve, a plum-pudding-shaped goblin calling himself King Christmas slips into the baron's turret, plies him with magic wine, and drags him on a haunting midnight tour of the suffering he has...

"The Arraignment of Christmas" unfolds as a mock legal and civic drama in which a Lady enlists a Town Crier to track down old Father Christmas, who has vanished from England's streets and homes. Through a vivid public cry describing Christmas as a plump, generous, grey-bearded reveller who once filled houses with roast beef, music, and mummers' plays, the story mourns a world stripped of feasting...

Mr. Grapewine's Christmas Dinner opens with a plump, jovial host hatching an elaborate scheme to make his holiday feast the most satisfying meal his guests have ever eaten. Convinced that hunger sharpens pleasure, he devises a two-week plan of frugal eating and aromatic temptation — then seals each invitation with a Turkish bath coupon. What follows is a cascade of outrage: every guest reads the e...

Colonel Crockett's Co-operative Christmas unfolds through two letters from a homesick Texan stranded in New York City over the holidays. In the first, Austin Crockett describes the crushing loneliness of spending Christmas night among four million strangers, a misery sharper than shipwreck or fever. In the second, written a year later, he reveals his audacious remedy: renting Madison Square Garden...

"A Christmas Accident" by Annie Eliot Trumbull centres on Mr. Gilton, a habitually cross man locked in a bitter feud with his next-door neighbours, the Bilton family. Years of petty grievances — a disputed fence, a poisoned dog, misdirected dinner deliveries — have hardened into cold silence. Then, on a blinding Christmas Eve snowstorm, Mr. Gilton accidentally enters the wrong house and finds hims...