Every year, Christmas comes.
And every year, whether you’re ready for it or celebrate it, there are expectations of how Christmas will go. That idea is guided by jolly portrayals in books, movies and social media with holiday spirit and mistletoe everywhere - with a dash of peppermint and festive corporate coffee drinks.
However, Christmas is rarely “perfect” and “bad Christmases” do exist.
In Better Next Year: An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies, writers in Canada share their memories of surviving the holiday wherever they were, whether in a shelter or on the streets, or with the in-laws. It’s about people encountering Christmas, knowing it’s important and it’s not going well. The book leans hard into imperfect experiences and shows what humans can do when things aren’t “right.”
When editor and writer JJ Lee explains what the book is about, listeners often respond with a story or memory of their own - a “bad Christmas” they carry with them in their history.
It’s a common human experience. “All the stories in the book are about people struggling to make peace with their family or find a way through the darkest time of the year. Literally, the darkest time of the year," said Lee.
The book takes on how they’re fighting social expectations, their expectations of what they want from their family or themselves and what they want to do, including the circumstances that they find themselves in, he said.
The desire to be happy is captured, even if it’s never quite accomplished.
“I think that perseverance, that sort of struggle to be happy, that wish to be happy is a really important message.”
Lee thinks it’s beautiful how people respond to that and remain “in tune” with the human heart that way.
“Even if you don’t use Christmas as the way to get there, anyone can respond to that effort, right? The trouble that we go through, the lengths we go through to try to be merry, right?”
There are books about sad Christmases, obviously.
A Christmas Carol is technically about someone who hates Christmas and there’s a long tradition in English literature of stories about people having bad Christmases.
However, Better Next Year is nonfiction. This is people saying “this happened to me, for real” and this is how it felt.
This was uncommon. “We were surprised to discover there were no books like it," said Lee.
As a mentor for Simon Fraser University’s The Writer’s Studio, Lee came across students with stories of difficult Christmases again and again. Soon, he started collecting them.
The book acknowledges or gives room to the idea of people not enjoying this time of year.
One story is by someone who has never enjoyed Christmas and still doesn’t. The young protagonist lets go of expectations to try to enjoy Christmas or be forced to enjoy it.
At a recent book reading held in Vancouver’s public library downtown, Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho, one of the authors, read snippets from her story in Better Next Year.
She said hers is about dysfunctional families, which represents everyone’s families. As a friend once told her, “There’s ‘fun’ right in the middle of ‘dysfunction.’”
In her story, Ho introduces her young son to her boyfriend’s born-again Christian parents, the first meeting between families.
As the parents take in her home and signs of a combined life, they stop at the sight of a wooden Buddha statue above her stove, visible from the dining table.
It had to be moved or they wouldn’t eat.
Ho suggests facing away from the kitchen but the parents won't budge.
“We won’t be in the presence of a false idol,” the father says.
Ho tries to lighten the mood and explains she inherited the carving from her parents when they moved back to Taiwan.
Her grandparents were faithful Buddhists who visited the temple all the time.
“I’m more Buddhist in principle. I’m a terrible vegetarian and I always kill mosquitoes," she notes.
Her son Lucas and boyfriend Sam laugh but Sam’s parents remained stone-faced.
She babbles more, overcompensating and sounding more like her parents when they first came to this country; over-explaining and apologizing for being different in an attempt to make people comfortable and so others wouldn’t view them as a threat.
And that’s just one scene from her Christmas story.
The book also includes stories by Tolu Oloruntoba, Sonja Larsen, Joseph Kakwinokanasum, Jennifer Allen, Joanna Baxter, Jaki Eisman, Jordan Kawchuk, Courtney Racicot, Ola Szczecinska and Goran Yerkovich.
Better Next Year was released on Nov. 1, 2023 by Tidewater Press and is available at independent and major Vancouver booksellers as well as online.
