The Stranger on the Other Line

I know it is late in the season, but I have one more Christmas story for you, which I present on the grounds that we are comfortably within the 12 Days.* Buried within this story is a message all writers can take to heart in the New Year.

The weekly newspaper appeared at our house one day bearing the details for an unusual call for short fiction. They wanted holiday stories—Christmas, Hanukkah, what-have-you—with only two stipulations. Submissions had to be a maximum of 300 words, and authors could not be older than 18 years of age. Payment would be exactly zero dollars, and all the copies young contributors could swipe out of the weekly advertiser’s boxes around town.

The year was 1980. I had just hit age 16 in the fall. I wanted to place a story in this paper badly. My ego demanded it. I had been submitting stories to EQMM and AHMM to no avail. It did not matter that this newspaper mostly reported on volleyball scores, town council news, and the openings of new hair salons. I needed the win.

My parents had bought me a used manual Olivetti ages ago. I rolled a sheet of paper in it, hunched over the damn thing, and paused.

I considered the competition. My gut told me that I was probably at the high end of the submission age group. It would be my story against a slew of little kids. I probably had the technical advantage but not if I gave the editors the same old thing.

What were they going to write, these mindless, Santa-loving weenies? I just knew. Mostly likely, they would write the sort of two-beat holiday story I hated: kid wants much-beloved gift, kid gets much-beloved gift—happy holiday, yay.**

My story had to be anti-that. Was it possible to write a Christmas story that celebrated no presents? Was such a thing possible? I didn’t know, but I had to try. It might set my work apart from everything else the editors might be seeing.

I ended up with a story that described harried grownups and kids queued at a store. Everyone is cranky, miserable, exhausted—until someone smiles and says something that lightens the mood. Whatever they said—and gee, I sure wish I could remember what it was—was just the injection of magic these people needed. Suddenly, the humans started humaning again and All Was Well in Holidayland. Ta-da. The End.***

I boiled that thing hard. Had to, to stay under 300 words. What kind of monsters were these editors? Didn’t they know 300 words was barely enough words for exposition? I was crafting art here.

I mailed the story. And waited. No response.

The paper always pubbed Wednesdays, which just happened to fall on Christmas Eve Day that year. When the paper showed up on my parents’ doorstep, I flipped through it anxiously until I found an interior double truck devoted to tons of holiday stories by local kids. Leading them all, at the top of the left column, was my story. It was the longest of the bunch.

At the bottom, my name, town, and age were printed in bold.

Holy smokes! My first byline in print.

I badgered my Mom to drive me to get more copies. Considering the ambitious menu she had on tap that day, it’s a wonder she didn’t kill me. Rather than drive around town looking for the freebie newspaper boxes, she cut to the chase by driving straight to the newspaper’s offices a few towns over. We knew it well; it was located next to our favorite Chinese restaurant.

Hours passed. My father returned from the city a little early that day. He was upstairs sorting mail. Downstairs, my mother was assembling one of those multi-course Italian American fish feasts that was our Christmas Eve ritual. The house smelled perfect, looked perfect, and I felt…awesome.

Then the phone rang. My father summoned me to take the call.

“Who is it?”

“I dunno,” he said, covering the mouthpiece. “Don’t stay on long. We gotta eat.”

I pressed the phone to my ear, and said hello.

“Joseph?”

I was expecting to hear the voice of a friend or family member. But no. The person on the other end was a grown-up and a stranger. Yes, I said. That was me.

“Joseph,” she said. “That was a very…good…story you wrote.”

It was a woman. An older woman. And she’d been crying. I could tell. She sounded choked up right now.

“Um, thanks,” I said. “Who is this? Is this Mrs.—”

And here I inserted the name of a family friend whose voice this person’s resembled.

“No,” she said.

“Then who?”

“You did a very good job with the story, Joseph. You have a Merry Christmas, okay?”

She hung up. Leaving me with a fresh mystery and not a lot of clues. My father, the only other witness to this person’s voice, was more interested in getting to the bottom of the minutes-away shrimp scampi than debating the identity of the caller.

What a world it was once! Strangers called your home, asked to speak to one of your teens, and you handed the phone over to said kid without asking questions. If you pulled that stunt today, they would revoke your dad license.

I dawdled that night over the shrimp, calamari, baccalà, tuna and spaghetti because my head was occupied with questions that could not be settled with food. Also, I was probably stuffed.

What had just happened? Was this the sort of thing that occurred when you printed a story? Was it going to keep happening? If this person wasn’t a friend of my parents, then who was she? Had she really been crying? If so, why? Did my story make her cry?

Back then, I was incapable of answering any of those questions. I would never know anything more about her than I’ve just told you.

My grown-up writer brain certainly likes to speculate. It starts by reminding me that the holidays are a difficult time for many people. There was nothing terribly special about my story. For all we know, this sad woman phoned dozens of kids that day, and wasn’t it nice that the newspaper made it so easy for her to locate us all in the phone book?

Here’s what grown-up writer Joe can tell you that kid Joe would not have been able to express. If we are lucky, yes, at the end of every story of ours there is a reader. A human impacted by our words.

I know opinions on this differ, but I write to please myself first, editors second, readers third. If I’m doing a capable job, there’s a chance I’ll make all three of us happy, but I can’t predict a damn thing. How anyone will respond to your finished work is a deeply personal, practically unknowable, thing, and it’s not worth your time worrying about it.

Yes, if editors routinely pass on your work, by all means write more, work harder, and learn more about the craft. But it’s wise not to get too attached to outcomes when drafting. You want to lose yourself in the world you’ve created.

But this I know. Stories are tools for touching other people’s hearts. They are emotion transmission machines, made by one person for another. That’s a fine lesson for a kid to learn at the beginning of his writer journey. And a handy one for any writer to recall at the beginning of another year.

I wish you all a beautiful, productive 2026, and I will be phoning you all shortly to relay these sentiments, though I will probably wait till after dinner.

* * * 

* The Twelfth Night marks the day when a heavenly host appeared to shepherds in London proclaiming the coming of Sherlock Holmes.

** This is precisely the plot of the beloved movie, A Christmas Story. Shows you how much I know about writing a good Christmas story.

*** Clips of that story were lost in one of my various moves over the years, but I remember the plot.

See you in three weeks!

Joe

josephdagnese.com