Vancouver writers share personal stories of their not-so-jolly holidays
JJ Lee and Sonja Larsen reflect on Christmas traditions in the antholgy, Better Next Year
In adulthood, rarely do we experience the Hallmark Christmas celebrations we dream of. In Better Next Year, editor JJ Lee and contributor Sonja Larsen share their nostalgic and often disastrous feelings about the holiday.
Lee is a B.C.-based writer, editor and former CBC Radio host. His memoir, The Measure of a Man was a finalist for the Hilary Weston Writer's Trust Prize in 2012 and was longlisted for Canada Reads in 2018.
Larsen is a fellow BC author and contributing writer for Better Next Year. She has been featured in publications like Room and THIS Magazine and she was a finalist for the 2016 Hilary Weston Writers' Trust Prize in 2017 for her memoir Red Star Tattoo.
Better Next Year: An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies is a collection of short stories by notable Canadian writers including Tolu Oloruntoba, Joseph Kakwinokanasum and Sonja Larsen. Inspired by experiences within marginalized communities and unconventional holiday traditions, this anthology highlights the messy, sometimes bleak realities of spending time with loved ones.
The Next Chapter's Ali Hassan sat down with editor JJ Lee and contributing writer Sonja Larsen to unwrap the true meaning of the giving season.
The holidays always come with so much expectation and it's hard to think it could ever live up to that. How did the idea for this book first come to you?
JJ Lee: I think it came two ways, if that's possible. I teach a lot of memoir and nonfiction and for some reason, over and over again, students kept coming up with the worst Christmas stories possible, just really broken hearted disastrous Christmases. There's this incredible pluck to the character and I just loved it. I just love that these people that I was working with in class or meeting at literary events had these incredible Christmas stories and these younger versions of themselves were surviving such dire circumstances. I thought it would be fantastic to burst the bubble on the perfect three percent that we share on social media and to finally have a book that actually has a long tradition.
Bad Christmases are always good Christmases when it comes to storymaking.
Bad Christmases are always good Christmases when it comes to story making.- JJ Lee
How would you describe your own attitude and feelings about Christmas?
JL: Mournful. It's really funny, it's both fond and mournful. At the book launch where Sonja read I gave a talk to frame the book and I remember talking about how all the good Christmases fade and so you always have to mourn them. I think that's why we get so geared up for Christmas, to make it perfect again and to have that moment and so, of course, we fail. It never meets what we hope for and so there's always loss at both ends, the future and the past. It's just this strange incapacity or inability to reach what we're trying to achieve and so that's my attitude: always seeking magic, believing it's there and never quite finding it.
Sonja, what did you think when you were approached about writing a story about Christmas?
Sonja Larsen: I think I was really interested because I thought I didn't really have any Christmas traditions and then when I really thought about it, the bad Christmas almost is the tradition. My family was a little bit unorthodox and we tried lots of different ways to avoid the Christmas hype and yet it is inevitable. It's inescapable for all of us, even those who really don't celebrate and I think we see that in this anthology. People are trying all different kinds of ways to deal with Christmas: hit head on, ignore it, work on Christmas, "it's not even my religion," and yet, boom, there it is… Christmas.
JJ, your story in the book is called The Harlequin Set and it revolves around the Christmases that you had as a child. Tell us about those.
JL: Speaking of mournful, The Harlequin Set is exactly that for me because, first of all, the farm is gone and that's the number one leg of the story, that it disappeared and along with it so many of the memories. There is a problem with the good Christmas, it is easily forgotten because it's a warm haze. One day my son was looking at a set of dishes that we had when he was very young and he said these are depressing and I didn't know what he meant. I picked up the dish and realized there was a dilapidated farm on the print set, like on the decoration of the plate and it just sent me back to one of those quiet moments at Christmas at my grandparents farmhouse. I could see the dishes in the cupboards and on the table and I just yearned for those days and they were gone. It was this strange sense of loss in so many directions: the loss of memory, the loss of the events themselves, the loss of the dishes and the loss of the farm.
It was this strange sense of loss in so many directions.- JJ Lee
Sonja, you spent part of your childhood living in a commune. What was it like to spend holidays there?
SL: Very chaotic, I would say. That was very interesting when I was writing this story — to think about what was the difference in celebrating Christmas in a commune where we were broke and there was a very uneven distribution of labour. We were sort of creating this utopian society but the women are all going to cook Christmas and the women are going to do all the dishes again.
A lot of tension around how that holiday would be celebrated and actually created and a lot of anxiety about sort of creating a different tradition. I contrast that with Christmas and a cult, which is very organized actually. So these unorthodox communal experiences have very different organizational structures to them.
In your story, it feels like your parents are both very much on the same page commune-wise. And then once they split both in their thinking and in getting divorced that began the tearful long distance call years. How did that shape your feelings about Christmas?
SL: Oh, I mean, profoundly. Christmas was this sort of time of — I don't know if I want to say dread, but definitely a time of reckoning. That there is this expectation of the perfect gift, the perfect moment, the perfect day and yet fundamentally knowing that on that day I'm going to be in tears. That was inevitable that my joy in one place was always my disappointment in another place. That distanced perspective has followed me basically my entire life really.
That was inevitable that my joy in one place was always my disappointment in another place.- Sonja Larsen
One of the things that happens with a holiday like Christmas is that from year to year we're very aware of how things change and in a way the rose-coloured glasses fall from our eyes and the inevitability of time passing looms large. So tell us about your Harlequin set and what it showed you about your own feelings about change.
JL: It makes me feel kind of bad that I keep on dwelling. Although writing itself, writing about the past sort of brings you to a kind of clarity. The sense of humour emerges, the sense of appreciation of the earlier version of yourself surviving an event or even thriving in an event, I think that's what makes the book so joyful — it's this incredible sardonic viewpoint that the contributors have about what happened to them.
I love Christmas but I also feel bad about loving Christmas so much if that makes any sense.
Writing about the past sort of brings you to a kind of clarity.- JJ Lee
The subtitle of Better Next Year is "An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies". Is there something about the season that can prompt a reckoning?
SL: There is something about recognizing that there is this ideal that you are not going to be able to achieve, but that lives burning bright in your heart that, as JJ says, you are always going to be a little bit melancholy over. To recognize both that sadness and also that optimism, that feeling of making it through the darkest days.
That is really the heart of what Christmas is: how do we make it through these darkest days? I mean, co-opted from pagan rituals, but there is something about when you know that you are going to make it through those darkest days that is kind of uplifting in and of itself. Sometimes the miracle is just making it through and that's not a small miracle. I think over and over again in this anthology, people find that hook to say "I'm going to be ok."
Not the Hallmark 'ok,' but they're going to find a way to be ok.
This interview has been edited for clarity and length.
