Free Stories for Christmas!

Some readers out there might know that every Christmas for the past 20 years or so, I have attempted to write some kind of Yule-themed story for my wife. The first story I ever had published, entitled “Jerry’s Last Fare” in the late Chicago Tribune Magazine, was also the first I ever wrote as a gift to my wife. For better or worse, I took it as an omen.

Since then, there has been a veritable Whitman’s Sampler of stories, some funny, some frightening, some strange. And since my wife is the understanding sort, she always accepts them enthusiastically, even when it’s obvious from the writing that my muse has been snowed in at Denver Airport.

Some of these stories you’ll never see, and you’re lucky for that, but a few of them aren’t bad. In fact, three of them have been set up as separate pages for this blog. It’s hard to notice the links to them at the right, so I thought I’d pull them out here:

“Mr. Dickens Buys a Comb”–in which our hero, Victorian in taste if not in time, has to navigate the perils of a megastore at Christmas to buy himself an article of personal hygiene.

“Chex Mix Confidential”–What is it about Chex mix? Why is it so impossibly addictive? Why do people get in heated arguments about the correct way to make it? This bare-knuckle police procedural blows the lid off the whole enterprise.

“The Marketeers at Christmas”–in which two nameless, shameless, witless advertising men spitball ideas about how to link Christmas with a corn-borer pesticide.

Please enjoy these little presents, and pass them forward if you do to anyone who would like them.

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