Christmas Magic Tales From The Heart Readers Share Their Favorite Holiday Stories

Sun., Dec. 22, 1996

By Dan Webster danw@spokesman.com

It seemed like such a simple project. Just ask readers to send in their favorite Christmas holiday stories. We figured to get a couple or five, pick the best three and make most everyone happy.

But the reality turned out to be quite different. Some 65 area writers answered our call, and the resulting situation forced us to pick and choose among a number of very good efforts.

Though two-thirds of the entries came from Spokane, the others represented towns as far away as Libby, Mont., to the east and Kennewick to the west. Other letters carried postmarks from such places as St. Maries, Sagle and Sandpoint, from Inchelium, Tekoa and Colville, from Kellogg, Hope and Cheney.

We left the style open. Resort to fiction if you wanted, we said, but true stories were perfectly fine. And the truth is what most entrants stuck with.

So we read stories about Christmases in which dads or moms or children struggled to make it home through incredibly harsh circumstances. We read stories about parents doing everything they could to make Christmas a happy occasion when money was low and hope practically non-existent.

We read stories about people making the ultimate sacrifice. We read of love and hope and forgiveness. We even read one or two stories that moved us to laughter.

We read so many stories that struck us with their depth of feeling, much less their quality of writing, that choosing among the “best” of them became almost painful.

How, after all, do you tell someone that the story about their dead family members didn’t quite make the cut?

So we did our best to accommodate as many as we could. We chose a top three, awarding the authors the respective cash prizes - $100 for first, $50 for second, $25 for third. And we chose several more to at least appear in print.

Still, we had only so much space. Some worthy writers, unfortunately, were left out. To those and to others who have similar stories to tell, we can only say … try again next year.

Our hope is that the very act of creation was as fulfilling for all the writers as reading the resulting works was for us. In some cases, it almost certainly was.

As one writer - whose story did not make the cut - wrote, “Thank you for giving me the jolt I needed to get busy and write the story of my favorite Christmas. It’s one of those things I’ve kept thinking I must do, but don’t quite get to it. It’s been a delightful way to spend this very chilly, gray November day!”

Read on.

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