My Christmas present to our readership is a potluck that brings out the diversity of creative nonfiction.
Like the best of holiday feasts, ours begins with a supremely edible appetizer that makes us grateful to be seated at such a fecund table. In An Edible Religion, Emma Kate I-Lan Tsai invites us to consider food as a relational object, so completely independent of the people, places, and times of our lives that anything non-culinary appears merely incidental.
Even so, few of us can get through the holidays without confronting the complexity of family life. Donna Steiner’s Orbits provides a fortunate antidote to the dictum that familial relationships must always have a grim side. The family depicted here has its problems, yes, but the positive ambience that imbues most of their interactions not only overmatches the negative side of their lives, but magically neutralizes it.
Of course, for many of us the holidays just aren’t the holidays without the possibility of the family’s awful truths breaking forth into conflict. Thus we have M. E. Griffith’s You’ll Miss Me When I’m Dead. If your own family is at all dysfunctional, I recommend—if you can pull it off—that you read this piece instead of spending much time with your relations at Christmas, or at any other time. There are reasons why the verisimilitude of the written word—no matter how morbid—is so often preferable to real life.