Christmas Magic

by David G. Hartwell (Editor)

A collection of holiday stories features the works of today's most popular fantasy and science fiction authors and includes the tale of a little girl's quest to become one of Santa's elves, a boy's discovery of Santa's tenth reindeer, and more. Original.

Genres: Fantasy, Christmas, Short Stories, Anthologies, Science Fiction, Science Fiction Fantasy

448 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published October 14, 1994

About the author

David Geddes Hartwell was an American editor of science fiction and fantasy. He worked for Signet (1971-1973), Berkley Putnam (1973-1978), Pocket (where he founded the Timescape imprint, 1978-1983, and created the Pocket Books Star Trek publishing line), and Tor (where he spearheaded Tor's Canadian publishing initiative, and was also influential in bringing many Australian writers to the US market, 1984-date), and has published numerous anthologies. He chaired the board of directors of the World Fantasy Convention and, with Gordon Van Gelder, was the administrator of the Philip K. Dick Award. He held a Ph.D. in comparative medieval literature.

He lived in Pleasantville, New York with his wife Kathryn Cramer and their two children.

Reviews

[Eamonn Murphy · Rating 3 out of 5]

‘Christmas Magic’ is an anthology of Christmas stories suitable for the festive season. Many, not all, are suitable for children. Some have a dark or satirical twist. It’s a few years old but still available first and second-hand from the usual sources.

The charming opener is ‘Scramblepipe Tries To Understand: The Gnomes Who Set Out For Christmas And Found That The World Is Round’ by Anonymous. The title is not much shorter than the story and sets out the premise nicely. I liked the ending and the children will love it.

They might not love ‘Nackles’ by Donald Westlake but, on the other hand, kids do have a certain darkness to their nature. The premise is that Santa Claus is a sort of god and, if enough people believe in a god, he exists. But for every good there is an evil, so a nasty father conjures up Nackles to frighten his unruly brood. Another clever one.

There is more adult fare in ‘Another Dime, Another Place’ by A.J. Austin which is long enough to be classed as a novelette. Not adult in the modern sense, sex and violence, but in theme. A well-paid business executive buys a postcard from an old street lady just so she will leave him alone and finds his life changed. However, his attempts to solve the mystery of her power gets him into deep water or rather dark alleys.

‘Bedlam Inn’ by Madeleine Robins has a traveller on Christmas Eve looking for a place to stay and finding the inn full. He sleeps, naturally enough, in the stables. As a 17th century Christian soldier, the irony is not lost on him. He finds a damsel in distress in the stable and some other company, too. Well written, witty and entertaining.

‘Grandfather Christmas’ by Robert Frazier and James Patrick Kelly puts the usual family difficulties in a modern setting. Grandma has died and her ex-husband, dead a while, pops up in virtual form to join the family for the festive season. Unfortunately, someone wants to permanently delete him. The intriguing possibility of a kind of cyber afterlife in the future fit well into the Christian theme and the ending was perfect according to the terms prescribed by Robert Silverberg: a surprise but, on reflection, inevitable.

The big names on the cover didn’t really deliver the goods in this anthology. ‘The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists: A Tale Of Three Kings And A Star For This Sacred Season’ by Harlan Ellison seems to be more of a joke than a story and one without a punch-line that I could see. Alan Dean Foster contributed ‘Diesel Dream’ which was better. I liked the truckers first-person narration and it definitely had a punch-line but it wasn’t especially Christmasy.

‘Santa Clause’ by Robert F. Young has a very un-Christmasy deal with the devil scenario. Ross sells his soul on condition that there should be a Santa Claus just for him. This means that when he writes his Christmas list, all his desires will be satisfied. The catch is that the Adversary, as he’s called here, claims he can’t sub-divide childhood fantasy and if there is Santa then there are other beings, too. A clever premise well-delivered but the ending baffled me.

My favourite in this collection is ‘Death In The Christmas Hour’ by James Powell. First published in 1983 in ‘Ellery Queen’s Mystery Magazine’ (so it predates ‘Toy Story ‘by more than ten years), this features a gang of familiar characters in a toy shop window display who come to life on Christmas Eve. Punch, Judy, jack-in-the-box, a toy bear, a toy soldier and, best of all, a toy Sherlock Holmes. Handy that last because there’s a murder. This was great fun with several witty asides.

‘The Boxing Day Spectre’ by Kit Reed gave a Christmas veneer to a haunted house story. The family problems will resonate with many young couples dependent on the bank of mum and dad for that vital house deposit. All in all, I enjoyed it.

As Charles Dickens practically invented the modern Christmas, it’s appropriate that he should feature in here somewhere. ‘Household Words: Or The Powers That Be’ by Howard Waldrop has Dickens doing one of his famous readings, this time of his most famous Christmas story. Oddly, the story and the character names are changed slightly but it’s supported by a sound knowledge of Dickens’ life and work.

I’m not especially keen on the commercial fest known as the Christmas season but do enjoy the charitable Christmas spirit and the day itself. As long as one keeps expectations reasonable, it can be a pleasant time of year. This is a varied collection and that may be a flaw. Commercially, it would have been better split in two with one anthology of nice stories for those who want to keep Christmas sweet and one of darker tales for fans of that ilk. Even so, the broadminded can enjoy it as it is.

Eamonn Murphy

[Steve · Rating 3 out of 5]

I bought a copy of Christmas Magic recently, knowing that I had already read and liked several of the stories but assuming that I would probably enjoy most of the others. Unfortunately, the ones I had read previously include most of the best stories in the book.

Several of the stories here range from poor to horrible. Many of the others are just okay.

The stories I do like include two horror stories, but with no blood shed in either. Donald Westlake's "Nackles" is about the making of a new sort of Christmas spirit. Mildred Clingerman's excellent "The Wild Wood" is about the perils that may arise when buying a Christmas tree.

There is a much nicer acquisition of a Christmas tree in Nina Kiriki Hoffman's "LaZelle Family Christmas," which I had not read before. This is a very sweet story of a family in which the different family members have a variety of psychic abilities. I wasn't surprised that I liked this; Hoffman has also written a superb Christmas story, "Home for Christmas" (The Magazine of Fantasy and Science Fiction, January, 1995), which I love.

There is another family Christmas in "Grandfather Christmas" by Robert Frazier and James Patrick Kelly. This was originally published in 1994. It is set in 2019; Frazier and Kelly were evidently expecting way more electronic advances than we really have. Artificial intelligence here could definitely pass a Turing test.
Also, the venerable science fiction trope the autochef, here called a Fabfood, makes Christmas dinner. (Although 2019 is still two years in the future as I write this, I don't think we will see this much progress in the next couple of years.) This gets points from me because it is set on Nantucket, a place I love. The family is the Brewsters; I have a feeling that the Brewster family from Arsenic and Old Lace must have had a Nantucket branch.

Another sweet and gentle story is Madeleine Robins's "Bedlam Inn." On Christmas morning, an old legend states, animals are given the power to speak. On this particular Christmas, what the animals say helps two humans who are sharing the night with them in a stable.

"The Boxing Day Spectre" by Kit Reed has a not-harmful supernatural being, a ghost haunting a house. The ghost does have a complaint; "I never get what I want," she says. What it turns out that she wants is kind of silly, which does hurt the end of the story. (As I write this in October, 2017, Ms. Reed just died last month. A fine and underrated author.)

I had read Margaret St. Clair's "An Old-Fashioned Bird Christmas" long ago and liked it. (It is the second oldest story in the book, originally published in 1961.) I still like it but it is certainly an odd story with a very odd (but sort of appropriate) ending.

In "Another Dime, Another Place" by A. J. Austin, the ending makes the story. A somewhat stuffy businessman has a couple of beneficial encounters with an older woman who sells postcards for ten cents each. She is poor and lives in an alley. How will they interact?

Janet Kagan's "The Nutcracker Coup" is about humans living on another planet with the intelligent beings that are indigenous to that world. The monarch of that planet treats his subjects badly. The humans there have decided to pick a day and celebrate Christmas. The stories twine together. This story was nominated for several awards - deservedly so.

"The Last Castle of Christmas" by Alexander Jablokov is the longest story in the book. It is set on another planet with some customs different from those on Earth, including making edible "castles" at Christmas. The science-fictional aspects of this story are less important than the human interactions.

I don't like José R. Nieto's story "Ixchel's Tears" as much as the other stories I have mentioned but it isn't a bad story and the basic plot device is unusual enough for me to include it.

Some other observations:

✳️There are way too many typos.

✳️There is a story titled "The Last Belsnickel" by Chet Williamson. I originally thought that "Belsnickel" was a word that Williamson made up; Google showed me that I was wrong.

✳️The very good cover is by Nicholas Jainschigg.

[Jennifer Wheeler · Rating 3 out of 5]

Eh. Some of the short stories were really great, while others where extremely boring and/or confusing.

[Linda Smith · Rating 2 out of 5]

I thought that I would Never finish this book. Had it been a novel, I would have given up weeks ago. But with a collection of short stories, there is always hope that the next story would be wonderful. Hope was dashed often. Out of the 28 entries in this collection, I liked 13 of them. But it often seemed that the worst stories were the longest. After plodding through one of those, I would walk away from the book for days. My biggest complaint is that it appeared that many of the authors didn't get the memo telling them the subject matter. While Christmas appeared in quite a few stories, the definition of magic was one that I am not familiar with. Why would aliens and space travel and sentient computers be considered "magic"? As a huge fan of this holiday, I found this broad interpretation of magic to be quite off-putting. I also like happy Christmas stories and quite a few of these were violent and evil. So, this book will not have a place in my permanent collection but will be donated to the library. I apologize to whomever it disappoints next.

[Christine · Rating 4 out of 5]

The best story in this collection imagines the anti-Santa Claus.

[Jeff · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a nice collection of fantasy and science fiction stories with a Christmas theme. There were a few stories I didn't care much for, but others that I loved, such as "Santa Clause" by Robert F. Young, about a man who wishes that Santa Claus really existed, but gets a rude surprise when his wish is granted; "The Outpost Undiscovered by Tourists" by Harlan Ellison, which is a fantastic variation on the legend of the Magi; "The Toy Mill" David Nickle and Karl Schroeder, in which a little girl, at her own request, becomes one of Santa's elves and find out that it's not all it's cracked up to be; "Merry Gravmas" by James P. Hogan, in which Christmas is replaced by a celebration of the birth of Sir Isaac Newton, which also happened to be on December 25th; and "The Nutcracker Coup" by Janet Kagan, in which an ambassador to a distant planet inspires a revolution in which nutcrackers play an important role...and many others. All in all, a very good collection.

[Jen · Rating 2 out of 5]

Out of 27 stories included in this collection, I especially enjoyed one ("The Nutcracker Coup" by Janet Kragan). One or two others weren't bad. That's not great from a percentage standpoint. There were more stories that I actively disliked than enjoyed. I also didn't get much of a science fiction feel from this. Later, I realized it was because this collection was first published in 1994 and includes stories from back to the 1960s. There's a lot that really doesn't feel very sci-fi'ey anymore after 60 years have passed. Nice to be in the season and an excellent idea for a collection but not especially my jam.

[Erin_boberin · Rating 3 out of 5]

2.5 stars. Some stories were better than others and the ones I didn’t enjoy always seemed to be the longer ones. I did enjoy several of the stories, but overall it was a pretty meh book for me unfortunately.

[Vickie Sonderman]

One of the worst collection of Christmas stories, actually, one of the worst books I have ever read. Hoping all the authors of these terrible stories have sharpened their writing game.

[KB Nelson · Rating 4 out of 5]

A great antidote to Christmas pap. Contains my favorite Christmas story, "An Outpost Undiscovered By Tourists" by Harlan Ellison. Hilarious? No. But certainly snicker-worthy.

[Robert · Rating 4 out of 5]

It's good, but could be better. It suffers from the usual anthology problem of uneven quality. In the end, however, the bad ones do not outweigh the good, not the aimless overshadow the meaningful.