Worst Christmas authors ever

Ho, Ho, No

‘Tis the season, and I’ve been thinking about Christmas stories. The genre has three main (evergreen) branches:

1. The magic of Christmas (Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer, A Visit from St. Nicholas, Frosty the Snowman)

2. Redemption stories (A Christmas Carol, The Grinch Who Stole Christmas, It’s a Wonderful Life)

3. Family/the true meaning of Christmas (A Christmas Story, The Gift of the Magi, A Child’s Christmas in Wales)

Doing something original in the Christmas genre practically means adding a new branch. Mostly people stick to the classic tropes. For example, with The True Meaning of Christmas you can just keep making Hallmark movies. There’s apparently a never-ending appetite for “good-looking, recently single woman with a stressful city job comes home for the holidays to a snowy rural town, where she meets a handsome local craftsman who makes wooden toys in his barn for orphans. A scheming developer wants to take over the property for nefarious capitalist purposes. She helps him thwart the takeover and, since they both look like L.L. Bean models, they manage to fall in love.”

There have been plenty of mediocre-to-great Christmas authors, but what I want to know is who would be the worst person to write a Christmas story? Without further ado, here are my contenders. N.B.: these are my parodies, not real quotations. Living authors, please take this in the spirit of holiday humor!

E. L. James

The billionaire threw me onto the bed. I was tied up in red and gold ribbons, and his fevered stare ratcheted my desire even higher. I could hardly bear it, but he demanded that I bare it all, giving myself to him like a Christmas present ready to be opened. But his was the toy I wanted.

“Come on,” I pleaded, “let me pull it out of the stocking.”

He peeled his tight black t-shirt over his head, showing his chiseled pecs. “Have you been a good girl this year?”

“Not in the slightest. I’ve been bad, very bad.”

“Excellent,” he smiled wolfishly, “Then you’ll need to be punished.”

Cormac McCarthy

The kid crouched by the meatfire poking the last of the embers. They were red as blood, red as the burnt ends of the velvet bag he had stolen from the old man. The kid had ridden hard out of Santa Fe near blown from his saddle by dust devils howling up the arroyos. All the way the old white beard was preying on his mind, how the kid had caught him unawares checking some list. The kid swore to himself that he was done thievin. He looked up at the night sky feeling the stars blaze down like God’s judgment, and knew the sawed-off rifle he’d bought down Mexico way would be poor hunting when them elves came calling for what was theirs. The kid spit a long stream of tobacco into the coals, reckoning that day was coming soon.

Raymond Chandler

I was pouring myself another whiskey from the bottle I kept stashed in my desk drawer when a bleach blonde dame came through the door. She had legs that went on forever and a scar on her face almost that long. I got out another glass.

“What do you know about reindeer?” she said, without preamble.

“In L.A.?” I asked. “You’d be surprised.”

She tapped a Lucky Strike out of a pack and leaned over for a light. I tried not to stare at her décolletage, but did a bad job of it.

“I think they’re involved with a slay,” she said.

“You mean sleigh, surely,” I said, although this was scarcer in sunny California than murder.

“I know what I said,” she replied tersely.

Tom Clancy

Ryan realized that it was serious as he read over the teletype from SAC-NORAD. At 23:17 hours a supposedly abandoned station at Nunavut reported an inbound bogie at 83°06’ N, small and moving fast. Adm. Wainwright, CINCLANTFLT, had scrambled a Harrier AV-8B and Ryan needed to be onboard. Their mission was reconnaissance and, most likely, target engagement. Whatever it was, they weren’t letting it near the American homeland without a welcoming party. Ryan debated strapping on his Glock 17, but decided against. The Harrier was no comfort ride with a pistol against his ribs. He headed out, hoping for an intel update from the KH-9 Hexagon satellite on whatever the hell this thing was coming out of the North Pole.

H. P. Lovecraft

“We are adrift on a speck of sanity in the black ocean of infinity, and are not meant to see the mad depths beyond our meager lifeboat.” These were the words I read in the diary of my Uncle, Dr. Theophilius Huffenstuff, professor of arcane languages at Brown University. “But in the translations of these eldritch manuscripts before me I have found a monstrous being in the frozen north who can peer into the minds of men. The texts say that this creature is not bound by our science, and it comes in horror to judge us all upon the Eve of Christmas.” Those were the last words. I searched in vain for another volume of his diary, but it, like my Uncle, had disappeared.

James Joyce

Snowrun sleighrun river crack with ice then came St. Nicholas before the bells but after the hooftrod down through Dublintown. Aye, but blown cold through the pub where Stephen Daedalus sat rapping for his pint.

—Well, says Joe, he’ll be down the chimney and all.

—What of? says Stephen, pay my five pound to the barman then?

—May ask for the English to leave as well.

The voice of Jenny behind, the lilt of a jig in 6/4 time, the loop, the warm soft joygush lickflow of the music sneaking past, invading. The hard notes behind the sound. Masters in This Hall on uilleann pipes.

—No, says Joe. The pack is the thing, all full of wallets, inkpots, olive branches, swords, daisies, Turkish lamps, knocker-uppers, buckshot, tin whistles, shiny Irish pennies, cakes and cream, puppies, beehives, medals for bravery, winedrunk from an auroch’s horn, wheels, keys, wax candles, stars plucked fresh from the firmament, oilskin coats, snails, Russian stamps, and tweed flatcaps.

—That so for gifts? says the barman. I’ll nae get paid afterall.

Lee Child

Reacher looked down at his blood-covered jacket. Fortunately, the blood was not his. Unfortunately, the jacket was only two days old. Fortunately, he generally bought new clothes every few days anyway. Reacher figured regularly getting new clothes was a better deal than going to the laundromat, which would only lead to buying his own washer and dryer, which would necessitate buying a house to put them in. Then he would be trapped in one place, which was a higher personal cost than the washer and house combined. He got enough of that in his Army days, and now he wanted to see the country.

Reacher wadded up his old bloody jacket, threw it in a sidewalk trash can, and walked into a thrift store just before closing time. After a quick look around, he headed up to the counter with the only thing on the rack that would fit his muscular 6’5” frame: a plush red coat trimmed in white fur.

“That all you need, Santa?” asked a skinny kid behind the counter wearing a Christmas sweater and elvish hat with bells on it. Reacher nodded agreement.

“For now,” he said, and counted out a few bills. As he did, Reacher swore he heard something walking around up on the roof. No, clopping around.

Scott Alexander

In The Sequences, Eliezer takes seriously the proposition that St. Nicholas—not the 4th century saint nicknamed “The Wonderworker” (the Kabbalistic implications here should be obvious)—but the polar-dwelling, sleigh-riding, absurdly generous jolly old elf of legend, is real. Not a Hanukkah tradition, but I thought I would do a Bayesian analysis of the Santa story.

Most people’s priors since childhood are that Santa Claus is a real being. Let us try update our posterior probability assignments by considering a few simple facts. Non-Christian children are by default assumed to be exempt from his mission. There are about 700 million Christian children (under 18) worldwide, which, at about 1.5 children per household, means 466 million Christian households with kids. Let’s generously assume each household has at least one good child deserving of presents from Santa. St. Nick has 86,400 seconds on Christmas Eve to make 466 million stops.

In the next 12,000 words I will consider the required speed of the sleigh, the mass of an average present coupled with the reindeer, sleigh and Santa, and calculate the needed energy in joules. Other factors such as fuel source, whether the reindeer could evolve skins like space shuttle tiles to withstand air friction heat, whether the use of local spacetime wormholes could speed delivery, and if Santa could bulk drop toys from the sleigh which shoot down multiple chimneys smart-bomb style and hence speed up delivery, will all be examined. Results will be examined for VC funding at the next meeting of our cult at a Bay Area House Party (tm).

To all a good night!

If you have some other choices for worst person to write a Christmas story (Derrida? Kripke? Freddie deBoer? Trump?) let’s hear it in the comments. Ya gotta write your own parody, though.