Write your own Christmas story

For readers of ten and over, and younger readers with a parent, grandparent, teacher or friend. Use it after the reading plan, or on any day.

Every story in this book began with someone noticing one small, true thing. O. Henry noticed one dollar and eighty-seven cents. Chekhov noticed a boy writing a letter to his grandfather at night, addressed “To grandfather in the village”. Andersen noticed a young tree that always wanted the next thing. Your own story can begin the same way.

Six steps

1. Notice one small thing. A coin, a smell from the kitchen, an empty chair, a letter, a lost glove, a song someone always sings. Write it down in one sentence.
2. Give it to someone who wants something. Della wants to give Jim a present. Vanka wants to go home. The blacksmith in “Christmas Eve” wants to marry Oxana. Decide who your person is, and what they want before Christmas Day.
3. Put something in the way. Della has almost no money. Vanka’s letter has no proper address. Artaban keeps stopping to help people. What stands between your person and what they want?
4. Choose who tells it. A grandmother tells “The Holy Night”. The poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” is told by the one person awake in the house. Frederick Douglass and Harriet Jacobs wrote about what they had lived through themselves. Will your story be told by the person in it, or by someone watching?
5. End with a change. Scrooge changes in one night. The fir tree understands too late. Your ending can be happy, sad or open, but something should be different from the first page.
6. Share it. A story is finished when someone else hears it. Read it aloud at the table on Christmas Day. Send it in a letter to someone you cannot be with this year, as Vanka sent his. Copy it out by hand, tie it with a ribbon and give it as a present, as Della and Jim gave what they had. Ask the person who hears it to tell you one of theirs in return.

Story starters

Use one of these, or change it until it is yours.

• On the morning before Christmas, I found a letter that was not addressed to me.
• Every year my grandmother told the same story, until the year she told a different one.
• The shop on the corner sold everything except the one thing I needed.
• Write a letter to someone you cannot visit this Christmas, in the way Vanka did.
• Write the night of a Christmas Eve from the point of view of a tree, a dog, a lamp or a star.
• Write a question you have always wanted answered, in the way Virginia did, and then write the answer.
• Write about a Christmas where you live: the weather, the food, the music and the people, as Henry Lawson did for the Australian bush.

For families

Keep a family story book. On each day of the reading plan, one person writes or tells one line of a story, and the next person adds the next line. By Christmas Day the family has twelve days of a story that belongs to all of you. Younger children can tell their line aloud while someone else writes it down, or draw it instead. On Christmas Day, read the whole story aloud together from the first line to the last, and give a copy to someone who was not there to hear it.

For teachers and group leaders

Each piece in this book can be the model for one lesson.

• ”The Gift of the Magi”: a story that turns on a gift and a surprise.
• ”Vanka”: a letter in the voice of a character.
• ”The Fir-Tree”: a story told from the point of view of something that is not a person.
• ”A Visit from St. Nicholas”: a poem in rhyming couplets about one night.
• ”Is There a Santa Claus?”: a letter asking a big question, and a reply.
• A Christmas Carol: one scene showing a character’s past, present or future.
• Douglass and Jacobs: a true account of a day the writer lived through, written so that readers who were not there can understand it.
• Dunbar’s poems: a short poem that gives a particular person a recognisable voice, without turning their speech into a caricature.

Every story in this book was written by one person, in one place, about the Christmas they knew. Yours can be the thirteenth.