LitReading - Classic Short Stories

This holiday story will only be available for a limited time on Litreading, but will always be available on our holiday story podcast, Season's Readings.First published in 1905, “The Boy with the Box” is a gentle Christmas story about childhood pride, unexpected generosity, and the quiet ways kindness reshapes a heart. It captures a winter world of skates and shop windows, family love and small sacrifices—where the true gift arrives not in a box, but in understanding.Mary Griggs Van Voorhis (1876–1938) was an American writer whose short stories often focused on children, family life, and moments of quiet moral awakening. Writing in the early twentieth century, she was known for her warm realism and her ability to find emotional truth in everyday scenes. Her work appeared widely in magazines of the era and remains admired for its gentle humanity and timeless perspective.Check out our multiverse of short story podcasts at shortstoryverses.com.

You've heard it dozens of times, so why not once more. Here's a Visit from St. Nicholas, was it penned by Clement Moore?

This story is only available here during the holidays, but can be heard year-round at Season's Readings, a part of Short Storyverses at shortstoryverses.comOn Christmas Day in the Morning is a story about family—not as it is imagined, but as it is lived—and the gifts that arrive without wrapping. It was written with music already echoing between its lines. The traditional song of the same name appears directly in the story, assumed to be familiar to its original readers.For this performance, the music is included not as embellishment, but as part of the text itself— the way it may have lived in the reader’s mind when the story was first published.Grace S. Richmond (1866–1959) was an American novelist and short-story writer whose work focused on family life, personal responsibility, and the quiet moral decisions that shape ordinary people.A frequent contributor to publications such as The Ladies’ Home Journal and The Saturday Evening Post, Richmond was widely read in the early 20th century. Her Christmas stories, in particular, favored restraint over sentimentality—using the holiday as a setting for reflection, reconciliation, and emotional truth.Her fiction was written to be shared, remembered, and reread—often aloud, and often at Christmas.“I Saw Three Ships (Come Sailing In)” Traditional English carolPerformed by Matt Norris & the MoonAudio sourced from Wikimedia CommonsLicensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 License (CC BY 3.0)

While this is primarily a story for children, Christmas is the perfect time to explore our inner child and share that spirit with today’s kids. This story originally appeared on my Readastorus podcast.Being a scarecrow is a hard enough job in the best of times, but when winter comes, it can be miserable. Yet, for one scarecrow, a frosty Christmas brought a wonderful opportunity.Mary Eleanor Wilkins Freeman started writing children’s stories as a teenager to help support her family. She went on to become one of the premier female authors of the late-19th century.

Santa and his friends face the most challenging Christmas in their long history as Santa is kidnapped.

For many children, Christmas is the best day of the year. Yet, often it’s for selfish reasons. Some kids like it so much that they might wish that Christmas day might never end. One little girl father explains what it might be like if it was “Christmas Every Day” by William Dean Howells.William Dean Howells was a proponent of literary realism. Called “The Dean of American Letters’” he was a playwright, author, critic andThe Atlantic magazine’s third editor.

Sometimes we fall so far that we are tempted to cross lines we never would have in better times. Feelings of inadequacy can become particularly acute during the holiday season, when we see so much apparent happiness. Our next story about one woman’s fall from grace and her Christmas redemption.Brilliant short story author, Mary E. Wilkins Freeman ’s "A Stolen Christmas" was published in Harper's Bazaar on December 24, 1887

This story is only available here during the holidays, but can be heard year-round at Season's Readings, a part of Short Storyverses at shortstoryverses.comOut on the western chaparral, Christmas doesn’t soften the land so much as sharpen what’s already waiting there—old grudges, old loves, and old wounds that never healed quite right. Madison Lane and Rosita McMullen have built a life together in the years since their wedding was interrupted by a jealous suitor… and a bullet. But Christmas Eve has a long memory in the Frio country, and something—or someone—may be riding back through the brush. O. Henry’s tale unfolds with warmth, tension, and a frontier kind of mercy that arrives in a shape no one expects.Chaparral Christmas was written by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), the American master of the gently-twisted tale. Known for his frontier characters, ironic turns, and deep affection for ordinary people under pressure, Porter captured both the humor and the heartbreak of American life at the turn of the 20th century. This story reflects his gift for revealing unexpected kindness in the harshest of places.

This holiday tale features Reginald, a fictional young-man born to the Victorian upper crust in England, who finds himself at a stuffy family Christmas party and tries to liven things up a bit.Saki, the pen name of British author H.H. Munroe, loved skewering the upper class, wielding the weapon of character’s like Reginald, who appeared in several of his short stories.