I’ve long been a fan of the prolific writer Kristine Kathryn Rusch, who writes romance, mystery, SFF, and incisive nonfiction on the craft and business of writing. She and her equally prolific writer spouse Dean Wesley Smith offer the best craft courses for writers I’ve seen online. (I’ve taken 9 of them—I think.) For the last five years, Rusch has offered her Annual Holiday Spectacular, a kind of advent calendar that ticks off the days from Thanksgiving to New Year’s Day, delivering a short holiday story to your email inbox of varying lengths and genres.

I’d known of it since its inception because I follow their blogs religiously. But I never sprung for it until last year, when I was emerging from my medical treatment. My wife had chosen to attend the World Cup Soccer Championship in Qatar, and we’d agreed to celebrate Thanksgiving sometime after her return home on December 1.

I was alone for Thanksgiving weekend and the early holiday season, babysitting our new puppy and trying to rebuild my physical strength. Most days, frankly, I napped in a lawn chair in the sun outdoors while the dog tore up the yard. I can’t tell you how cheered I was to have a fresh short story in my inbox on those days when I wondered where my life and my health were headed.

Rusch’s Spectacular is determined by the calendar, and since Thanksgiving came early in the US in 2023, that means 40 stories will hit my inbox before the holidays have run their course. Sometime later, Rusch will send subscribers an ebook containing all 40 of the stories as a keepsake. (Here’s an affiliate link to the first collection that was done in Year 1.) I will probably buy the three paperback anthologies that will be generated from this project as well. At least 12 anthos from previous years have already been published. (Here’s an affiliate link to the previously published anthologies.)

This year, I thought it might be fun to do capsule reviews of the stories as I read them, just to show you the variety, and what you’re in for if you elect to subscribe next year. To that end, I’ll do regular posts this season reviewing 10 stories or so at a time. I love Christmas, and frankly am capable of reading holiday stories throughout the year, so this is not unusual for me. What is unusual is committing to reading each of these stories like clockwork, as soon as possible after they arrive. With the fatigue I suffered last year, I couldn’t stick to that kind of schedule and ended up cramming a bunch of stories in on weekends. But we’re not decorating heavily this year, so I will have more leisure time, he said hopefully.

If you think you might be interested for next year, I recommend joining the WMG Holiday Spectacular mailing list. You can check out swag at that website too.

The first story of 2023 was a systems test, to make sure that subscribers are receiving Rusch’s emails.

• “The Taste of Miracles,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. Two pilots sip cocoa on a freight run to the moon and back. It’s Christmas, and they reflect. Quiet story, over before you know it, but manages to be poignant and bittersweet all the same.

Here’s the first true story, which arrived Thanksgiving Day when I was still whipping up my pumpkin pie filling. When the pie went in the oven, I cleaned up and sank into the couch to read…

• “A Special Dinner,” by Dean Wesley Smith. A mathematician and a pilot of a long-range spacecraft meet in a nursing home as elderly people but are sent back in time when they accept a dangerous mission to push the boundaries of space travel. SF-romance in an established DWS series. The plot is sweet but at 11,000 words, was a little too much to read for the first day when I was stuffed as much as the bird.

Then, after that came the following nine, nine days in a row…

• “Days of Mourning,” by T. Thorn Coyle. Rusch calls this a dark crime story, but I found it more bleak than dark. The protagonist works at a progressive shelter in San Francisco that doesn’t serve a full-on Thanksgiving dinner because they’ve chosen to honor the indigenous Day of Mourning. The descriptions of homelessness are what’s dark here, but the plot mostly concerns the search for the missing dog of a unhoused man. The ending managed to be both tragic and uplifting. It’s the only story out of these ten that left me sobbing like a baby. Great piece.

• “Hidden Treasures,” by Kristine Kathryn Rusch. A mainstream/upbeat story about a woman with a tortured past choosing to shop at a small store for Small Business Saturday. (The day after Black Friday in the US.) It’s a quiet story, with the epiphany coming at the very end, sneaking up on you before you know it.

• “The Great Tamale Sauce Bakeoff,” by Kat Simons. A young Manhattan chef is pressed into helping a neighbor in her apartment building suss out the secret of her late grandmother’s tamale sauce. We meet a half dozen characters of different races, ethnicities and sexual orientations in a flurry of intros, which is tricky for many writers to handle, but works well here. The cast of characters made me long for New York again. By the end, love conquers all. I counted three love secrets, if you count the secret of the tamales, which you should, since food is love.

• “The Haunt of Wren Mountain,” by Jessi Hammond. Sage is a young woman raised by her grandparents and uncle in a coal-mining town in Virginia. She hasn’t spoken since the day her mother drowned. Her beau goes off to fight in WWII, and Sage and her fellow villagers begin spying ghosts in the surrounding woods. The story builds to its climax inside a collapsed mine, but by then I was swept along by the beauty of the language. The most striking prose thus far in the project.

• “Tremolo,” by Irette Y. Patterson. A sweet story of budding romance between two violists (yes, you read that right) who live in different cities but come together regularly to play their instruments. Our narrator, the woman musician, has such trouble committing to anything that she moves to a different city every seven years. I loved when she told the guy, “You know I’m weird, right?” Been there, done that. Sweet story.

• “The Dead Ringer,” by C.H. Hung. A hard-boiled story about cops coercing a disbarred lawyer into impersonating a witness in an upcoming trial. All Dennis Tran has to do is to stand on a corner in Times Square, ringing a bell and collecting spare change from hordes of holiday tourists. But Tran has lived on the street so long that he’s smart enough to catch a murderer on his own. I loved the gritty portrayal of Manhattan during the holidays.

• “The Most Impressive Courage of a Little Tortie Cat,” by Kari Kilgore. This romance story, involving two cats, a meet-cute between a beautiful cybersecurity expert and the ruggedly handsome landscaper hired to string holiday lights at her parents’ country inn didn’t do it for me. I’d never been a fan of romance, but last year’s Spectacular made a believer out of me. I can still recall the details of two of the sweet romance stories that charmed me in 2022. But all I could do while reading this one was wonder why it had to be 6,000 words long.

• “Luck at Christmas,” by Mary Jo Rabe. The school superintendant and his wife are corrupt sonsabitches who are grifting the school district for personal gain. Lon is the school’s dimwitted janitor who is practically invisible, and thus the only one who can save the day. A slow-build, just-desserts crime story with a dry sense of humor. Dug it.

• “Merry Bloody Christmas,” by Jessi Hammond. A gangster hires Dog to track down a woman who’s stolen from him, and bring her in alive. Dog executes the job perfectly, but one look at the girl’s eyes alters Dog’s game plan. You don’t want to cross Dog. Not on your life. A hard-boiled Christmas story by the same Australian writer who gave us the coal-mining story on Day 5. Crisp, tight, well done.

That’s a peek at the first 10 stories. More reviews in 10 days.

See Part II of this series, with my review of the second batch of 10 stories.

See Part III of this series, with my review of the third 10 stories.

See Part IV of this series, with my reviews of the final 10 stories.