Season's Readings – Christmas Stories and Holiday Tales

This is a special Christmas bonus episode for Season's Readings listeners.Frank has reasons for not decorating anymore. Christmas is quieter now. Darker. Easier to ignore.Then a new neighbor moves in next door—six years old, endlessly curious. What starts as a simple conversation turns into a small act of defiance against grief, routine, and the belief that some lights, once turned off, should stay that way.The Star is a gentle story about unexpected persuasion, borrowed wonder, and how the smallest voices sometimes know exactly where the switch is.If you enjoy short stories, there are dozens more just waiting to be heard on the Short Storyverses channel or at shortstoryverses.com

On 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)

BE AWARE: This is a family-friendly work of speculative fiction that asks: what if Santa Claus were something far stranger, and more wonderful, than we ever imagined? THose looking for a traditional Santa story may be disappointed.In Santaverse, a brilliant researcher completes a quantum experiment that opens a door she never meant to find. What begins as a scientific breakthrough quickly turns into something stranger—and far more personal. On the other side of the connection is a presence that shouldn’t exist, a figure woven from equal parts myth, memory, and physics. And once contact is made, nothing in her world—or any world—stays simple.

Out 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.

The Burglar’s Christmas is Willa Cather’s deeply human Christmas tale—published under the pseudonym Elizabeth L. Seymour—about a young man who has utterly failed in life and reached the end of his rope on a slushy Chicago Christmas Eve. Hungry, cold, and convinced he has squandered every opportunity he ever had, he turns to theft as a last act of survival.But the home he slips into isn’t just any home. It’s the place where his past—and his pain—wait in the shadows. What follows is a moving story of recognition, forgiveness, and the kind of unconditional love that can pull even the most broken soul back from the brink.Cather’s tale blends realism with emotional clarity, delivering a Christmas story that avoids sentimentality while celebrating the deepest meaning of the season: the moment when grace replaces despair, and a prodigal child returns to the arms that never stopped waiting.Willa Cather (1873–1947) was one of America’s finest novelists, best known for My Ántonia, O Pioneers!, and Death Comes for the Archbishop. Early in her career she wrote under the pen name Elizabeth L. Seymour, producing short stories and sketches that revealed her gift for capturing human frailty and quiet courage. The Burglar’s Christmas, first published in 1896, shows her emerging voice—clear, empathetic, and profoundly attuned to the inner lives of ordinary people.This episode is part of Short Storyverses, a storytelling universe of classic tales, original fiction, children’s adventures, and holiday stories. Explore them all at ShortStoryverses.com.