Skipping Christmas

by Heather Shaw & Tim Pratt

The flight was dead: to begin with. Leo Altman was seated in suite 2K in the first-class section, his usual preference since the first row was too close to the bathroom, and had almost the whole cabin to himself. There were fourteen seats up here in first, and as far as Leo could tell, there were only two other passengers, neither nearby. There might be teeming hordes in coach, but those poor souls boarded through a separate entrance, so he’d never know. He doubted even cattle class was crowded, though. He’d done this same flight a dozen times, the first few in his early thirties, when he could only afford business class, and it was never a crowded route.

Not many people chose to take the nonstop flight from Los Angeles, California to Sydney, Australia on the evening of December 24th. If they did, they crossed the international date line on the way, landing in Sydney on the morning of December 26th, and skipping Christmas Day entirely. Leo hadn’t experienced Christmas in over a decade. Oh, Christmas still happened — his nibling Ash always sent a cheerful text about it, for one thing — but it happened without Leo, taking place on a page of the calendar that he didn’t inhabit.

The plane taxied and lifted off, and Leo ignored the chatter from the cockpit and settled in. A flight attendant brought merely adequate champagne, but soon returned with a glass of better Scotch. She didn’t even wish him “happy holidays.” Leo was content to spend the next thirteen hours basking in serenity, another annual landmine successfully avoided.

His first-class suite didn’t have a door, or even a privacy curtain like some other airlines provided, but given his scheduling needs, it was the best he could do. Usually, it was good enough. But not this time.

This time, a stranger slipped into his suite and sat down on the little jump seat across from his recliner, meant for guests to visit and chat. The interloper was short and slender, dressed in white silk pajamas, with an eruption of pale yellow hair on top of their head, but the sides shaved. Their eyes were bright, and their smile wide; the overall impression was of an anthropomorphic candle. Leo couldn’t guess their gender (but then, his nibling was nonbinary, so he was used to that sort of thing) or, more strangely, their age — young, old, neither?

“Hello, Leo,” they said in a voice that trilled. “I’m sorry for the lack of warning. I usually work with a team, and ideally we like to send a mutual acquaintance ahead to make introductions, but we’re terribly busy lately, so you’ll have to make do with me alone.”

An intrusion. In another five years, if things continued as planned, Leo would be able to stop flying commercial entirely; by the time he was fifty, he hoped to have his own private plane.

“Please return to your seat,” Leo said. “Don’t make me call the flight attendant. I hate fuss.”

“But Leo, we have so much to talk about!”

He sighed. “Listen, if you’re a protestor, or something, that was all down to the management team at the factory. I certainly never told anyone to do those things.”

“Oh, I don’t protest. I . . . reclaim.” They held out one slim-fingered hand. “I’m pleased to meet you in person, Leo. I am the Ghost of Christmas Past.”

Oh, God. Was this some sort of cosplay? “I don’t care about Christmas, past, present, or future. It’s a day that’s never done me any good, and it’s done me plenty of harm. I’m calling —”

The stranger grasped his hand. Their touch was icy and hot all at once, like a healing balm. “Rise, and take a walk with me.”

Leo tried and failed to pull his hand away. “What, down the aisle?”

“Eventually, but first,” they said, holding on tight. The plane banked, but the two of them didn’t bank with it — instead, they rose out of their seats, and passed through the hull of the plane, and out into the freezing torrent of night air. Leo screamed as they began to fall, and screamed harder when he realized they were falling upward, into a bank of clouds —

The mists parted, and Leo lurched against a familiar wall. He was in the home of his younger sister Pamela and her family, standing in her spacious living room, in front of a towering blue spruce bedecked in too many lights and ornaments . . . but there was something wrong. Granted, he hadn’t been to her house for a dozen years, not since that last disastrous attempt at a “family Christmas,” but —

That was it. He hadn’t been here in a dozen years, but the house was the same as he remembered from that visit, with the old blue wallpaper and the brown carpet, both of which she’d replaced (white paint and restored hardwood, respectively) — updates he’d only seen in photos online, and in the pictorial Christmas cards she still sent, their one non-practical form of communication these days. “It’s even the same tree,” he murmured, and the self-proclaimed spirit was at his side, nodding.

“We have returned to your past, though we exist as ghosts here. Do you remember this day? The last holiday you spent with the people who love you, and whom you once loved . . .”

Leo walked away from the impossible creature, toward the kitchen, and saw what he dreaded: his own self, a dozen years younger, sitting at the kitchen island with a glass of untouched wine. Pamela leaned against the counter on the other side, as far away as she could be from him without actually leaving the room. Neither took notice of the current Leo’s arrival.

Pamela spoke through gritted teeth. “That’s not the point. You could have just told me you wanted to come tonight, Leo. You didn’t have to threaten us.” She dropped her voice an octave. “‘Shouldn’t the person who pays for your child’s fancy private school get invited to Christmas dinner’ — what’s wrong with you? I asked you to join us for years, and you always said no, so eventually I stopped —”

“And then I got Ash into Marley Sims Academy, and paid the tuition, and you still didn’t invite me back.” The bitterness in the younger Leo’s voice was poisonous. The new Leo’s guts twisted, and he groaned. He didn’t want to see this. He knew the argument spiraled from there, into bitterness and shouting, old wounds reopened, and ended with Leo storming out and swearing he’d never darken their door again — though of course he kept paying for Ash’s school; it wasn’t their fault, and he’d never intended to make a threat. He’d just wanted to . . . to spur Pamela into showing some gratitude for once. After that year, he’d started taking flights to skip Christmas entirely. That way, it didn’t sting so much, to never be invited. But it stung freshly now.

“Take me out of here,” Leo said, turning to the spirit, who was looking at Ash’s artwork, pinned up on the fridge. The kid showed a vibrant eye, even back then.

“It’s good for you to see this,” the spirit said.

Leo scowled. “You said we’re ghosts here?”

“Gaze upon the actions of your past, and consider the repercussions . . .” the spirit blathered.

We are as ghosts, Leo thought. Ghosts could do things, couldn’t they, at least in some stories? Leo had never been good at waiting and watching. He believed in decisive, confident action; that was the key to success. And, also, possibly, the key to some of his problems . . . but who could change their own nature? He was a person of action, so he acted.

Leo walked up to his younger self, who was taking a drink of wine and preparing a blistering verbal attack that would effectively end his already tenuous relationship with his sister, reducing their contact to emails about tuition statements and stiff invitations to Ash’s performances and graduations, though he only managed to attend the latter. Leo walked into his younger self, and it was like stepping into a freezing shower, a bracing shock to the system.

“What are you —” the spirit said, and then their voice abruptly cut off. Leo’s vision briefly doubled, and then cleared, and he tasted wine in his mouth. Old Leo was in younger Leo’s body.

This ghost could possess people. Or himself, anyway.

Leo opened his new old mouth . . . and all decisiveness fled. How often had he imagined living this moment over again? How often had he considered calling Pam to try to make things right, only to be stopped by pride — why should he be the one to apologize? But it wasn’t pride, was it? It was fear. Fear that Pamela would never forgive him, not again, not after so many other squandered chances.

Fear that he wouldn’t deserve her forgiveness if she did.

He slumped. “I’m sorry, Pammy. You’re right. I was feeling unappreciated, and I acted like an ass.”

Pamela didn’t un-bristle. “We never asked you to get our kid into that school, Leo. Ash was perfectly fine at the local elementary school. But then you showed them those brochures and told them about the art classes and the theater program and the music, and got them all excited, but you never even mentioned the school to us! Ash came to us begging to go, and that was the first we heard about it, and then you come along and say, oh, I know some people, and I can pick up the tab. Do you have any idea how screwed up that is, Leo? You went around us, about our own child. David can barely stand to speak to you anymore. But Ash was so excited, we couldn’t say no. And after all that you want to be treated as a hero?”

Leo opened his mouth, then closed it again. He felt his way forward carefully, a word at a time. “I . . . see your point. I was just afraid, if I came to you first, you’d say no, the way you always did when I offered to help you out before, with the house and grad school and . . .”

Pamela sighed. “We might have said yes. For Ash. Turns out you’ll do anything for your kids. But, Leo, we’ve talked about this before. The only way you try to relate to us is with money. It’s like you’re trying to buy your way out of the hard parts of a relationship. Like if you pay enough, you’ll never have to endure a meaningful conversation. We are grateful that you’re helping Ash, but you could have been close to Ash, and close to us, without making some big financial gesture. You could have just . . . Leo, you could have just said you were sorry, about everything. And meant it.”

“I . . .” He swallowed. The word wanted to stick in his throat; that word was weakness. Wasn’t it? “I’m sorry.”

“We’ll see if you mean it,” Pamela said. And then: “I really hope you do.”

Before Leo could respond, a cold hand touched the nape of his neck, and he found himself torn out of his younger self. He staggered across the room, and the Ghost of Christmas Past seized him by the wrist again.

“Most unorthodox,” the ghost murmured. “But I suppose no one else will ever know about it, and you do show a capacity for regret.”

“Is this just an image, a simulation, or did we really go back?” Leo clutched at the spirit. “Did I change —”

“We have more to see,” the spirit said, and this time they dropped through the floor, into the basement, where Ash and their father David were playing on a new video game system, and then deeper, into the dirt, and down, and down, and down, Leo shouting incoherently even as soil filled his mouth —

They landed in the snow, out front of Pamela’s old house, the smaller one, where she’d lived with David right after they got married, before Ash was born. An even younger Leo stood on her front steps, wearing a scarf and a coat that was too thin, and he leaned on the buzzer until the door finally opened. Leo walked over the snow — he left no footprints — and mounted the steps to look over his younger self’s shoulder. Pamela was so young. What was she, all of twenty-three? Which meant Leo was twenty-five — one of the hustling years, the all-nighter years, the coding-until-dawn years. A time of moves and maneuvers, before he’d discovered that appearances mattered more than substance.

Pamela glared at his old self. “Fuck off, Leo.”

Her brother lifted a box, wrapped not in Christmas paper, but in silver wrappings decorated with bells. “You sent back your wedding gift. Seems like a weird oversight. You registered for it and everything . . .”

“I sent it back because fuck off,” Pamela said. “You missed the rehearsal dinner because you were making some deal, and then you showed up late to the wedding and weren’t in any of the photos, and then you screwed a waiter at the reception and didn’t even give your toast!”

The ghostly Leo groaned, unheard by the younger siblings. That year he’d been — well, under a lot of stress, and also, there’d been a certain amount of cocaine. This conversation went badly, too, with the revelation that Pamela hadn’t even wanted him at the wedding, that her parents had insisted she ask him to give a toast, and that she’d been a fool to listen to them. Their relationship had thawed a little in the years later, but it never really healed.

“Can I change things, Spirit?” Leo asked.

“It is never too late to change, on this side of the grave,” the spirit said.

Leo sighed. “Not what I meant.” He stepped into his younger self again, prepared for the disorientation this time. Newly embodied, he set down the box — which contained a Le Creuset enameled cast-iron Dutch oven in deep blue — on the snowy steps.

He opened his arms. “I’m an idiot, Pam. I . . . was on a lot of drugs, to be totally honest, but I’m going to stop that shit. I mean it.” He really had stopped, too . . . a couple of years later, after getting a nosebleed during an important pitch; he wouldn’t let his drug habit get in the way of his success. “I’m a total mess, and you suffered for it, and . . .” This time, the words were a little easier to get out. “I’m sorry.”

“It’s going to take a lot more than sorry, Leo. And we all know you’re a cokehead! It’s not like you’re good at hiding it.”

This was news to old Leo, who winced in his young body.

Then Pamela touched his arm. “This really sucks, you know? We’ve never been close, not the way I wanted. Not since . . . when we were kids, when I got hurt . . . you just pulled away, turned inward, wouldn’t let me in. That’s why I asked you to be an usher and to give a toast at my wedding. I was hoping it could . . . open a door for us.”

Leo blinked at her. “Mom and Dad didn’t make you include me?”

She snorted. “Has anyone ever been able to make me do anything?”

Leo snorted back. She’d only said that about his parents to hurt him, then — but he couldn’t blame her. He’d said plenty of hurtful things, too. Hadn’t he called her a child bride at one point, said she was throwing her future away on a man she barely knew? She’d proven him wrong by parenting a child and getting a PhD.

“I want us to be close, too,” Leo said. “I always have. I just . . . I’m not good at this stuff, Pammy. It’s easier to . . .” Oh, god. Was he having an insight? Into himself? “It’s easier to screw things up on purpose, sometimes, than to worry how I’m going to screw them up by accident.”

“You need some therapy, big brother,” Pamela said. “Lots of therapy. Especially because . . . well . . . in about seven months, you’re going to be an uncle, and I can’t have a total fuck-up like you around my kid.”

Leo gaped. In reality, he’d found out about Pam’s pregnancy from his mother, who assumed he already knew; he wasn’t sure Pamela ever had actually told him about it directly before Ash was born. “I . . . Pam, congratulations, that’s . . . wow. And, yes, I’ll —”

The spirit yanked him out of his body again and into the snow, but the snow turned to clouds, and they drifted like snowflakes themselves onto the lawn of a narrow two-story home that Leo only saw anymore in his dreams. He moaned. “Stop. Come on. I get it, okay?” He stood, brushing snow off his knees. “You’re sort of a therapist, aren’t you?”

The spirit flickered like a flame. “If you’d gotten therapy,” they said, “maybe you wouldn’t have needed me. Come on.”

“I don’t need to see this. You think I don’t remember?” Leo snapped his head upright. “But I can change it, this time, can’t I?”

He got to his feet and raced for the front door, the spirit calling after him, but Leo refused to listen. He smashed his shoulder into the holly wreath on the front door of his childhood home, but passed through as if it were smoke. He stumbled and looked up the stairs, the banister wrapped in green garlands, and there was Pamela, standing at the top, twirling an umbrella striped like a candy cane. He ran up, saying, “No, no, no,” and reached for her, but she was smoke, too. He could only interact with himself, it seemed.

Leo tore past her, down the hallway, and found his room, decorated with posters of heroic robots and bright galaxies and photos of the moon. There he was, eight years old, sprawled on his bed, reading a comic book and not even thinking about his little sister, whom his parents had asked him to watch for fifteen minutes while they went to the store for more wrapping paper.

His little sister, who’d just seen Mary Poppins, and didn’t see why she couldn’t fly with an umbrella, too. It was basically a parachute, after all, and so she leapt from the top of the stairs, and broke her left leg, and sprained her right ankle, and was lucky she didn’t die. The family spent Christmas Eve and Christmas morning in the hospital that year.

It was Leo’s first bad Christmas. He hadn’t believed Christmases could be bad, before that. First and worst. The Christmas he was still trying to fly away from.

Leo leapt into his child self. It was harder than before, like struggling into a sweater that was too small, but he managed, and rolled off the bed, and scampered down the hall —

— just in time to see little Pamela leap, and to watch, horrified, as she struck a step, and sprawled, and tumbled, limbs waving, until she hit the floor. He hadn’t seen her fall last time, only heard her screaming, and now that started up, and soon the door would open, and his parents would be there, and they would say, Why weren’t you watching your sister, we trusted you —

“I’m sorry,” he sobbed, kneeling. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m sorry —”

The spirit drew him out again, but more gently this time, and a moment later, they were back in the airplane, Leo in his seat, the spirit across from him. Leo closed his eyes. “I’m so sorry.”

“You were just a child,” the spirit said. “You made a mistake. No one truly blamed you, except yourself. Even your parents weren’t angry, not after those first frightened moments — they felt guilty, more than anything else.”

“Not as guilty as I did.” Leo put his face in his hands. “After that, every time I looked at Pamela . . . every time I saw garland or a Christmas tree . . . I felt so awful. And to see Pamela, at Christmas? Nothing worse.”

“New memories can be made,” the spirit said. “Old ones can fade.” They paused. “And you really should consider therapy.”

“But wait. I did change things, didn’t I?” Leo perked up. “Not the accident, but later, we went back in time, and I made different choices . . .” Leo had gotten good at reading people, over his years in business, and even if the spirit wasn’t a person, the look of pity on their face was clear enough. Leo’s brief hope curdled like old egg nog. “We didn’t really travel in time, did we?”

“No. What we saw were visions. The past is my domain, and I do have some sway over time — I can stretch it, and make a single night seem to last for days, for instance. But to go back a dozen years or more . . . no. There would be too many consequences for an act like that.”

“It’s too late, then.” Leo slumped. “Even if I wanted to go to Pamela now, see her and Ash and David for Christmas, to say I’m sorry, finally, and mean it . . . I can’t. By the time we land, even if I catch the next plane back, even with the time change working in my favor, I’d still land too late. So was the point of all this to make me feel bad, and live with the consequences? To see the moments where I made bad choices, and know I can’t do anything about them?”

The spirit gazed at Leo with a look of curiosity.

Leo sighed. “I guess it’s fair. My family’s had to live with the consequences of my actions for years, and they don’t get do-overs, either. There’s always next Christmas. And I can lay the groundwork, start reaching out, try to connect . . . and, yes, I hear you all about the therapy.” Leo’s mind, so often engaged in stratagems for success in business, began to devise stratagems for familial success. “I wish I could be there for Christmas, it’s so much at the heart of all this . . . this damage . . . but there’s always next year.”

“Well. You’ve displayed an impressive amount of growth for one night.” The spirit steepled their forefingers together and looked thoughtful. “You know, as I said, I have some sway. I can’t transport you back a dozen years, but the plane only took off half an hour ago, in real time, and it would be a shame to make your family wait a whole year . . .” They reached out and touched Leo’s wrist, and the two of them fell out of the plane again.

This time when they landed, they were in the boarding area by the gate at LAX, and there was a younger Leo — younger by perhaps a whole hour — approaching the First Class entry line. There was a richness to the colors all around him, a crispness to the air, a brightness to the sounds, that told Leo this was different than the other trips to the past  — he’d only visited those. He could live in this one.

“Go on, then,” the spirit said. “This sort of thing isn’t strictly allowed, but I’m working alone tonight, so no one has to know.”

Leo grinned at the spirit and rushed across the terminal, running straight into himself from behind — stepping into a body that fit him as comfortably as his favorite shoes. He spun on his heel and marched away from the gate, back toward the exits, wheeling his bag along behind him. He glanced back, once, and thought he saw a flicker, like a candle flame, disappearing into the air.

Leo pulled out his phone one-handed, and told it to call Ash. When his nibling answered, he said, “Hey, kid. Can you put your mother on? I want to ask her something . . . and tell her something else.” He grinned. “Yes, you’re right, I’m sorry, and no, I didn’t forget — Merry Christmas to you, too. Merry Christmas to us all!”

Host Commentary

…aaaaand welcome back. That was SKIPPING CHRISTMAS by TIM PRATT and HEATHER SHAW, and if you enjoyed that, pretty much every Christmas story we’ve run since 2010 has been one of theirs; if you go to our website,

PodCastle

, and either find the post for this story to click on Heather’s name, or search for her in the sidebar, you’ll find them all listed under Authored Episodes. Tim has also had a bunch of non-holiday stories here over the past 15 years, so if you click his name you’ll find all them, as well. There’s enough there to keep you occupied for the rest of the year—literally.

It’s often called the season of forgiveness, when we’re all expected to bury the hatchet and come together for the sake of family. Frankly I think that’s often used in a toxic way, and that families can be the worst for taking advantage of your good nature, and that you don’t need to do anything you’re not ready for, whatever the time of year; anybody who actually gives a damn about you will wait for your forgiveness, not force it. But the message here of forgiving yourself? Well, that I can get on board with, unequivocally.

I mean, I say “unequivocally”, what I mean is, “I want it for you, but will fail to do it for myself”, because I am a hypocrite—and I am only human, after all, with all the mistakes and miseries one would expect in 4 decades, with the added neurodivergent anxiety of reliving them on a regular basis like my very own Ghost of Bullshit Past. But, well—I promise I’ll try and work on the self-forgiveness if you do too, yeah? The world is already a hard enough place to thrive in. We oughtn’t make it any harder on ourselves. We should cheer ourselves on for our achievements, not lambast ourselves for our failures—and if nothing else, we’ve all made it through another year, and hopefully know ourselves a little better, and each other a little better, and are one step closer to that place of happiness and stability that we all deserve—yes, that you deserve. Merry Christmas, and a happy new year.

As part of our 15th anniversary celebrations, we’ve been asking you to send in your favourite stories from our archive. We’ve got two final suggestions to round out the year, from each end of our archive: Jessi Clark recommends episode 38 from 2009, “In the House of the Seven Librarians” by Ellen Klages: “I aspired to be a librarian as a child, and this story highlighted all the different reasons why. As a parent, I’m lucky to live in a robust library district and live vicariously through my children as they participate in various programs run by the librarians (after hours nerf gun wars for the win). What pushed this story to a recommendation level is the current politicization of this wonderful profession. Thank you for all you do!”

And from earlier this year, an anonymous commenter recommends episode 774, “Yung Lich and the Dance of Death” by Alex Fox, saying: “The story was hilarious and heartfelt with the narrator hitting just the right tone of awkward and sincere. But what really made it great was the production quality. There was background music, the raps were turned into actual songs, and the sound effects were spot on; all of this really elevated the story from a reading to an experience. Well done all around.” Thank you, both, and thank you to everyone who’s helped us celebrate these last 15 years with all your recommendations down the months. It’s been a delight to see so many old titles given mention again, many of which have been my favourites from down the years too. Here’s to 2024, and all the years beyond, and the new favourites that await us. Happy new year!