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” ‘Hurry, hurry, hurry,’ she said, for it was dark then, and she knew that we are bound, one to another, in licentious benevolence for only a single day, and that day was nearly over.”

Those are some of the final words of John Cheever’s classic 1949 New Yorker short story “Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor,” which begins below:

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.

Read the full story here.

— Posted by Alexander Reed Kelly.

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