To Everything There Is a Season: A Cape Breton Christmas Story

W.J. Keith is a retired professor of English at the University of Toronto and author A Sense of Style: Studies in the Art of Fiction in English-Speaking Canada.

This superb Christmas story, originally written as early as 1977, was
published in Alistair MacLeod’s second collection of short stories, As
Birds Bring Forth the Sun, in 1986. It is a beautifully written,
bittersweet Christmas tale told in the voice of a small boy (or, more
accurately, of an older man remembering his life as a small boy) who is
reluctantly beginning to lose his belief in Santa Claus, but is still
poignantly unaware that (as the reader gathers) his father is dying. It
is set in a remote part of Cape Breton, and lovingly records the
traditional seasonal rituals of cutting a suitable tree in the forest
and going by sleigh along snow-covered logging trails to attend church
on Christmas Eve.

This is a decidedly short short story even by short-story standards,
taking up only 16 pages of text. Here, however, it is supplemented by an
evocative series of black-and-white illustrations by Peter Rankin, a
Cape Breton fisher and artist, which effectively catch the spirit of
MacLeod’s writing. An introductory essay is unsigned but presumably
(since this is “A Douglas Gibson Book”) by Gibson, who has done so
much to foster MacLeod’s career as a writer. It provides a brief but
sensitive history of Cape Breton; similarly, at the end, there are
informative short biographies of both author and illustrator.

This is a small book obviously designed for the Christmas gift
market—and why not? It is a gentle, sad, backward-looking tale about a
world that is virtually, if not totally, lost; as a result, it contains
a touch of the sentimental—but again, why not? McClelland & Stewart is
correct in describing it as “our own classic Christmas story,” but,
Canada being Canada, it has not yet achieved classic status. In any
other country, it would become a custom to read it at every Christmas in
the tradition of Dickens’s A Christmas Carol. And yet again, why not?