Twelve Tales for Twelve Days

"Christmas is a time for stories like no other time—a time for fantasies, memories, and mysteries. Here are twelve tales to tell over the twelve days of Christmas."

From Crisis

By Sean Fitzpatrick

Christmas is a time for stories like no other time—a time for fantasies, memories, and mysteries. Here are twelve tales to tell over the twelve days of Christmas.

Christmas was the beginning of the greatest tale ever told, and lesser tales have mingled with it for centuries to participate in its glory. 

On this night, God became Man as singing angels gathered peasants and kings and beasts beneath a sky of dancing stars. Every Christmas since, ghosts have gamboled in graveyards, animals have been known to speak, elves have played puckish tricks, and wondrous miracles of mercy have come to pass. Christmas is a time for stories like no other time—a time for fantasies, memories, and mysteries.

What stories will you tell your family this Christmas? What poetry will grace your hearth and home? What will your children dream of after you read by their beds? Here are twelve tales to tell over twelve days that anyone—be they parent or priest or partridge in a pear tree—might read to themselves or (even better) to their dear ones. When it comes to the Twelve Days of Christmas, what better gift can anyone give their true love?

The 1st Day of Christmas, December 25: 
“A Child’s Christmas in Wales” by Dylan Thomas (1952)

Dylan Thomas’ “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” is an ice-crystal kaleidoscope of family and friends, of food and fun, of laughter and tears dancing in and out of a white wintry fog of memory. Everyone shares Christmas, and all Christmases are so much like another: visions, vignettes, and voices that hang on the edge of a stream or dream of consciousness—never clear, but always strong in impression and presence; at once as distinct and indistinct as shifting temperatures or shimmering scents and, though glancing and ghostly, are the foundations of security. The charming power of this prose poem is that it is about every one of us, awakening memories of who we are and why we are. All share these memories in common, reflecting the Common Savior who was born to save the common man. 

The 2nd Day of Christmas, December 26: 
The Story of the Goblins Who Stole a Sexton by Charles Dickens (1836)

What could be further from Christmas cheer than a crusty undertaker carving out a grave in a desolate churchyard? But Charles Dickens knew the power of paradox and the name of this shoveling sexton proclaims the mystery of Christmas: Gabriel Grub, divinity and decay juxtaposed. As Gabriel made “brave lodgings for one” to gripe with Christmas, a goblin appeared on a headstone with accusations against the man who dug a grave on Christmas Eve to spite the joys of humanity. So begin the dreamlike journeys of Gabriel Grub, with goblin-glimpses of hardworking men and devoted women, till “he came to the conclusion that it was a very decent and respectable sort of world after all.” In this origin of A Christmas Carol, Dickens poses that people often must believe in goblins before they can believe in God.

The 3rd Day of Christmas, December 27: 
The Shop of Ghosts by G.K. Chesterton (1909)

Wandering into a peculiar toy shop, we meet an ancient white-whiskered man sighing beneath a modern truth. The toymaker is none other than Father Christmas, and he is dying—but he’s still alive. Christmas has been barraged by materialism and consumerism and sugared over with “good-will-toward-men” platitudes. The spiritual center has been lost—but it’s still there. As with other holy days, what the Church has established as upright, the world turns topsy-turvy. Let no Catholic stand idly by while earth claims what Heaven has made its own. Santa Claus is a captive of a Christless Christmas and a ghost of his former self. Father Christmas’ spirit has suffered, but only because it was worthy of assault. But, as G.K. Chesterton’s chipper trifle assures us, though he may be dying, Father Christmas will never die.

The 4th Day of Christmas, December 28: 
The Tailor of Gloucester by Beatrix Potter (1903)

The richest Christmas traditions celebrate down-to-earth things in celebrating the greatest Down-To-Earth Thing: the Word made Flesh. This is why fairies, ghosts, and elves play a part in Christmastide’s union of the ordinary and the extraordinary. While the Christmas fairy tale “The Elves and the Shoemaker” introduced the idea that elves are quite normal, Beatrix Potter raised the stakes. The Brothers Grimm would have us understand that elves are like mice. Miss Potter would have us understand that mice are like elves. The Tailor of Gloucester is a tale that keeps alive the belief that there are ordinary things in the world that can accomplish extraordinary things. With God nothing is impossible.

The 5th Day of Christmas, December 29: 
Where Love Is, God Is by Leo Tolstoy (1885)

Martin Avdeitch was a poor cobbler who lost his family one by one, leaving him alone and dejected. Searching for God in the Gospels, he saw Christ coming to the houses and hearts of those alone and dejected. Then Martin was shaken by a voice: “Look out into the street tomorrow, for I shall come.” So, Martin prepared to welcome Christ on a frozen winter’s day. Though eager to meet Him, Martin grew dismayed as the hours passed bringing only poor folk to his door, until a hidden truth suddenly made his dream come true. Tolstoy believed the underestimated poor were the preservers of Christianity and so wore peasant garb and refused writing royalties. Like Martin the cobbler found, God hides where many least expect to find Him.

The 6th Day of Christmas, December 30: 
The Little Match Girl by Hans Christian Andersen (1845)

Hans Christian Andersen’s fairy tales tread deftly between the realms of parable and metaphor, and so it is with The Little Match Girl. On a cold New Year’s Eve, a barefoot, suffering little girl sells matches in the street, giving readers a picture of mankind’s lot by sin. We are nothing more than broken wanderers battered by the harshness of this vale of tears and the rolling years. But amid this pilgrimage so often filled with sorrows, we are given flaring moments of warmth and visions of the eternal banquet to which we are all called in the end. We should be as the little match girl and not be saddened by the falling star or the falling year, but rather look up and out with hope for the peace of God which surpasseth all understanding. 

The 7th Day of Christmas, December 31: 
The Little Juggler by Barbara Cooney (1961)

Barbara Cooney’s presentation of the old French folktale of the tumbler of Notre-Dame is beautiful in its medieval manuscript illustrations and graceful retelling. It follows a little orphaned juggler named Barnaby who performs his last act before a statue of the Virgin Mother and Child in a dark church on Christmas Eve. The little juggler could offer nothing but his frivolity, but the human race is, after all, a frivolous race. But play is pure, even profound. As Scripture reminds us, Wisdom was with God from the beginning, playing in His presence and in His creation. Christ became a Child to make all things new, as children do when they play. Man is called to play before God just as Barnaby did, and even as God Himself does in His cosmos.

The 8th Day of Christmas, January 1: 
“Christmas Trees” by Robert Frost (1916)

When a man from the city offers to buy the balsam firs growing in a pasture to sell as Christmas trees, an amusing and poignant exchange follows between him and the farmer who owns them. Like so much of Robert Frost’s poetry, “Christmas Trees” is frank and forthright in working out a bit of wisdom that is most welcome in the cultural clamor that Christmas exists in. It invites us to cherish what we truly value, even if it doesn’t hold up to “The trial by market everything must come to.” Christmas calls on us to take good stock of the goodness of things rather than fly into the frenzy of the world’s evaluations. Christmas should be more about appreciation than appropriation—even as the farmer discovers the thousand Christmas trees he didn’t know he had.

The 9th Day of Christmas, January 2: 
The Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle by Arthur Conan Doyle (1892)

Ice cold logic was ever Sherlock Holmes’s calling card, and the few times he exhibited mercy, therefore, were mysteries in themselves. The chief of these instances occurred at Christmastime over a goose, a jewel, and a groveling criminal. Just as Mr. Holmes was himself a mysterious paradox of rationalist and romanticist, so is Christmas composed of paradoxical mysteries in the juxtaposition of earthly and divine nature. The world of 221B Baker Street is one of similar juxtaposition, where courage and justice clash with helplessness and crime, casting warm light through the frigid fog, with pistols in every pocket, and flying the banners of honor and hope. Sherlock Holmes is a hero who evokes the optimism of salvation—especially in that merciful moment when a miserable thief was given a second chance on Christmas Day.

The 10th Day of Christmas, January 3: 
The Other Wise Man by Henry van Dyke (1895)

This story of long ago puts a twist to the tale of the three wise men: Artaban, the fourth wise man, was left behind when the famous three set out. Artaban spent his days seeking the new King whose birth the stars foretold, carrying three gemstones for the Child under his cloak. Over the course of the story, he finds himself in difficult situations and his gifts provide the means required to remedy them. Like the man in the parable of the pearl of great price, Artaban sold all his possessions to buy these treasures for the King and earn eternal life. This was the expectation of his faith. What he did not expect was that he would have to give these gifts to others out of love, learning that men gain best by giving.

The 11th Day of Christmas, January 4: 
“The Journey of the Magi” by T.S. Eliot (1927)

Eliot’s poem presents a stark, yet salvific, pagan perspective of Christ’s Nativity. While the world exulted in the Incarnation, the worldly were left desolate and divorced from their broken idols. The words of the wise man in this poem are not comforting, for Christ stands in opposition to the comforts he has known. His birth is as a death knell for an old, crumbling order. As dawn disorients those who have spent too long in the darkness, so is the wise man left reeling, unable to fully understand the event he witnessed in Bethlehem. But all are called to gaze into the light until follies and falsehoods are burned away, and we are able to realize that our death is a birth into eternal life—and to find it satisfactory.

The 12th Day of Christmas, January 5: 
The Gift of the Magi by O. Henry (1905)

No one can give of themselves like a wiseman before they give themselves up like a fool. There is no gift if there is no sacrifice. This tale of love, courage, tears, and terrible joy breathes with the sacrificial gift-giving that makes Christmas holy. Though short, its memory stays long, for people do not soon forget what leaves them happy yet heartbroken. In their material riches, the characters in the story are likened to the Queen of Sheba and King Solomon. With the loss of their riches, they are no longer compared to Old Testament monarchs but with New Testament ones—the Magi. These two young lovers are described as foolish (as lovers are); but foolishness is often the way to wisdom (as lovers prove).