May 16, 2025, 9:30am
According to the powers that be (er, apparently according to Dan Wickett of the Emerging Writers Network), May is Short Story Month. To celebrate, for the third year in a row, the Literary Hub staff will be recommending a single short story, free* to read online, every (work) day of the month. Why not read along with us? Today, we recommend:
Alistair MacLeod, “To Everything There Is a Season”
The short stories of Alistair MacLeod, a beloved Cape Breton writer who died in 2014 at the age of 77, are quiet, incantatory conjurings of bygone Canadian life. Almost all of them are set in MacLeod’s native Nova Scotia, and almost all of them are set in the past, often as remembered by an aged narrator who may or may not be the writer himself. Also, not much happens in a lot of them (or so it seems).
“To Everything There Is a Season” is a perfect example of all of this: an old man looks back at a particular Christmas in his long ago youth, when his father was still alive and his older brother was working the boats on the distant Great Lakes and when, as we learn, he first set aside childish things…
The story begins:
I am speaking here of a time when I was eleven and lived with my family on our small farm on the west coast of Cape Breton. My family had been there for a long, long time and so it seemed had I. And much of that time seems like the proverbial yesterday. Yet when I speak on this Christmas 1977, I am not sure how much I speak with the voice of that time or how much in the voice of what I have since become. And I am not sure how many liberties I may be taking with the boy I think I was. For Christmas is a time of both past and present and often the two are imperfectly blended. As we step into its newness we often look behind.
We have been waiting now, it seems, forever. Actually, it has been most intense since Halloween when the first snow fell upon us as we moved like muffled mummers upon darkened country roads. The large flakes were soft and new then and almost generous and the earth to which they fell was still warm and as yet unfrozen. They fell in silence into the puddles and into the sea where they disappeared at the moment of contact. They disappeared, too, upon touching the heated redness of our necks and hands or the faces of those who did not wear masks. We carried our pillowcases from house to house, knocking on doors to become silhouettes in the light thrown out from kitchens (white pillowcases held out by whitened forms). The snow fell between us and the doors and was transformed in shimmering golden beams. When we turned to leave, it fell upon our footprints and as the night wore on obliterated them and all the records of our movements. In the morning everything was soft and still and November had come upon us.
Read it here.