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Bewildering Stories discusses...

Not a Normal Holiday

with Amita Basu

[Amita Basu]

As a child, I stirred gumbo on the stove of our Baton Rouge shotgun home when her voice swelled with pride for the first non-Italian pope in hundreds of years and his inspiring sermons in Spanish. She was devastated when he was assassinated just two years later.

This is when I realised the story was an alternate history, since the pope survived the assassination attempt and stayed in office. Perhaps I should’ve guessed earlier.

[Don Webb] The first clue comes earlier with: “A small date stamp in the white margin says 1981, the year I was born, shortly after the death of the Holy Father in Rome.” The pope did not die in 1981.

[A. B.] “Ashamed of her secret habit, she couldn’t bring herself to purchase them outright and ended up back in Monterrey.” — This is telling and tragic. It's awful that we're made to feel ashamed of our addictions rather than getting help and dealing with them openly.

[D. W.] The narrator’s mother was a chronic smoker and was arrested for shoplifting cigarettes. Curiously, she seems to have been less ashamed to smoke them than she was to purchase them. Be that as it may, the incident contrasts a trivial cause with disastrous effects: a relatively paltry misdemeanor causes her deportation. We do know that she lived in the U.S. for at least 15 years, but her citizenship status was evidently never formalized, because she drowned while trying to recross the Rio Grande.

[A. B.] “Vermont was known to be kind to immigrants, and Burlington soon felt like home to three Mexicans born in the U.S. but speaking Spanish around the dinner table.” — As a non-American, I know Burlington and Vermont in general only as the home of Bernie Sanders. This sounds right.

[D. W.] A number might say, “Feel the Bern!”

[A. B.] “What are the ultimate causes of Javier’s and Ronny’s deaths?” — Intolerance, prejudice, and religion being allowed to intrude on politics and on people's personal lives. The ending is devastating. The narrator loses the only family she has left. A taut, enjoyable story.

[D. W.] All the narrator’s losses are due to exclusion in some form: her mother, on the basis of citizenship; her father, on account of inadequate health protection in the workplace; her son, because he was homosexual; and her daughter could not get a safe abortion.

Readers may pick and choose all, some or none of the exclusions as being justified. However, one wonders why the story resorts to inventing a change in the history of the Roman Catholic Church. If the idea is to emphasize harshly punitive social values, why go to such lengths? And why stop at Catholics? Such attitudes can be found in various places in all denominations of Christianity and, for that matter, in all religions.

The title “Not a Normal Holiday” is the most insightful part of the story. Christmas has always been the opposite of a “normal” holiday. The tragedies that befall the narrator’s mother, father, son and daughter are all due to exclusions imposed by arbitrary political, economic and cultural norms. Replacing exclusion with inclusion in all three phases of society was Jesus’ ministry and, ultimately, the Way of the Cross. If anything, the story reminds us that the same is true now as it was 20 centuries ago.

Copyright © 2021 by Amita Basu
and Bewildering Stories