Countering holiday expectations

Better Next Year: An Anthology of Christmas Epiphanies
by JJ Lee (ed.)

New Westminster: Tidewater Press, 2023
$24.95  /  9781990160271

Reviewed by Selena Mercuri

*

The holidays are often a time of performed togetherness. From staged dinners to cheesy Hallmark movies, we are conditioned to approach December as if the mess of the year—its grief, failures, ruptures—can be undone with a bit of festive cheer. Better Next Year dismantles that illusion. These twelve stories, authored by Canadian writers across generations, identities, and geographies, offer a counterpoint. Christmas here, instead of being a redemptive climax, is often a recipe for disaster: a time when the emotional seams of ordinary life become increasingly visible and frayed.

The opening piece, “Tortues de Noël” by Sonja Larsen, sets the emotional register for the anthology. Writing from a period of personal and economic collapse, Larsen recounts a Montreal Christmas spent in a basement apartment with a turtle named Jean-Pierre, an unreliable roommate, and a half-dissolved sense of self. What might sound eccentric at first becomes firmly grounded in everyday reality. Larsen writes: “You can get used to almost anything, as long as you name it.” The absurd becomes normal, and the holidays pass with the slow resumption of living, rather than outright catharsis.

In “B v. J.,” Wiley Wei-Chiun Ho documents a Christmas visit with her Christian in-laws that descends into an ideological ambush. Her story draws attention to the politics of domestic space and the subtle forms of religious intolerance. When Ho is told that a carved Buddha in her home is a “false idol,” she absorbs the moment in silence, noting: “Compassion didn’t have to equal capitulation.” Her response captures the tension between tolerance and conviction, and reflects the collection’s deeper concern with what it means to stay open-minded without giving yourself away, especially when your child is watching. Ho doesn’t resolve the conflict, but she makes its stakes clear: how to protect your values without replicating the harm of those who question them.

Goran Yerkovich’s “Furby Call Centre” captures the absurd exhaustion of seasonal work in a low-tier tech support job, where malfunctioning toys and malfunctioning lives blur under fluorescent lights. His voice is sharp, funny, and attuned to the quiet humiliations of precarious labour. One of the most cutting moments comes during a phone call with his mother, when he reassures her that the office is putting on a turkey dinner for the staff. In reality, he eats a microwave meal alone at his desk. Yerkovich conjures a world of unglamorous and the unspoken solidarity of the overworked. “We didn’t need to speak,” he writes. “We understood each other just fine.” In that silence is something harder than sentiment: the kind of closeness built not through expression, but endurance.

“Shelter” by Jennifer Allen is told from the perspective of her childhood self, recalling a Christmas spent in a women’s shelter after fleeing domestic violence. Her mother, both a source of protection and volatility, moves the family through unfamiliar spaces and shifting expectations. In one of the most jarring moments, Allen is handed a wrapped present to pose with for a media photo at the shelter. She smiles for the camera, imagining what might be inside. Once the shoot ends, the gift is taken away. “Shelter” revolves around the quiet adaptations children make in uncertain environments—how they navigate adult failures, struggle to understand the nuances of abusive dynamics, and learn to expect less even as they hope for more.

In “Aiden,” Courtney Racicot offers a moving account of longing for a child and navigating the obstacles of the adoption process, only to lose the child she and her partner had begun to imagine a future with. Aiden, a baby placed in their care after being removed from his birth mother, quickly becomes the centre of their household. The story traces love’s bureaucratic edges: home inspections, supervised visits, the ache of knowing nothing is guaranteed. When Aiden is returned to his mother, Racicot and her partner are left with what she calls a “quiet, storyless grief.” Months later, she sees him unexpectedly—healthy, loved, waiting for a photo with Santa—and tries to let that image be enough. She paints a portrait of parenting defined not by possession, but by care that endures without claim.

“Coyote’s Tail” by Joseph Kakwinokanasum recounts a childhood shaped by poverty and the pressure to maintain appearances. His mother, struggling with addiction, warns him and his siblings that any visible sign of instability could get them taken away. At school, Joseph fails an assignment that asks students to donate a Christmas gift because he can’t afford to participate. He avoids school trips for a similar reason. Wanting to contribute something festive at home, he sets out into the woods to find a Christmas tree. He finds one, small and manageable, but hesitates. He remembers a story his uncle once told him: a raven dares a coyote to steal, and the coyote is punished by the Creator—his once-beautiful coat turned mangy, with only the tail left intact as a reminder. Joseph decides not to cut the tree and returns home. In a world pushing him to conform or conceal, he chooses instead to honour his own sense of right and wrong.

“Vienna” by Joanna Baxter offers a tonal pivot—a story of intergenerational absurdity that begins with her elderly mother’s mounting frustrations with technology. Her mother sees her iPad as a “sleek alien metal device with a perplexing glow-in-the-dark apple that might blow her up if she tries to use it with a wet finger.” The story builds to a chaotic outing to hear the Vienna Boys’ Choir: Baxter’s teenage daughter can’t stop laughing, her mother finds the program lacking, and Baxter tries to maintain the illusion that everything is going well. Beneath the comedy lies the realization that her mother is becoming more childlike, more fragile, and increasingly preoccupied with getting things right before time runs out. Despite the initial disaster, this story has one of the warmest endings in the anthology—a recognition that even imperfect moments can be perfect in their own way.

In “The Harlequin Set,” JJ Lee revisits his grandfather’s farm and the disorientation that followed its sale after his grandfather’s passing. What lingers isn’t just the loss of place, but the loss of shared Christmases. These memories are carried in a chipped bowl, in a set of faded plates. His son, examining one of their dishes, calls the design depressing, prompting Lee to realize how much of their kitchenware had become an archive of his childhood Christmases. They decide to start fresh, collecting mismatched white and cream-coloured plates from thrift stores—a “harlequin set,” and the source of the story’s title. In the final scene on Christmas, the table has changed, but there is still laughter and cheer. The warmth of the past doesn’t vanish entirely; it simply takes a different form.

Jordan Kawchuk’s “Forty Dollarama Cards” is kinetic and unsparing. Living in a sober house, his regular trips to Dollarama become one of the few freedoms he’s allowed. One day, standing in the holiday aisle, he feels “a sudden urge to reach out, to reconnect, and dust off [his] heart.” He buys forty cards and begins writing to friends, family, people he’s hurt or drifted from. The story cuts through sentimentality with sharp self-awareness, skewering the jargon of recovery culture and the loneliness of holiday dinners with strangers. The story hinges on the hope that some bridges might still be crossable. Among them is the one leading back to his partner Lauren, whose hesitancy to have Kawchuk return home remains the story’s most unresolved thread.

“Scrambled Liver” by Jaki Eisman deals with recovery of another kind. As a former patient in an eating disorder clinic, Eisman reflects on what it means to eat publicly, to date, to meet someone else’s parents while carrying the residue of long illness. She vividly captures the physical awkwardness of the dinner table, the emotional claustrophobia of small talk, and the courage required to remain seated through both.

“Pulled Pork, Brisket, Polish Ham” by Ola Szczecińska is a story about dislocation, grief, and survival. In the aftermath of losing her father, her apartment, and most of her possessions, Szczecińska spends the days before Christmas living in her car and wandering Vancouver. She considers going to Money Mart to take out a loan and becomes fixated on the idea of treating herself to a brisket sandwich. Knowing how expensive it is, she debates settling for pulled pork instead. After a tense encounter with a police officer, she resolves to find something—anything—to hold on to. “It was time to dig my nails in, grab a hold of something, and fight for it,” she writes. “Today I’d settle for a pulled pork sandwich.” The story remains open-ended but closes on a hope: that next year, she won’t still be living in her car.

The final story in the collection, “Because” by Tolu Oloruntoba, opens with the line: “When you’re about to stick the corkscrew into the old, perhaps original wound, it is normal to feel a whirling sensation in your core, a terror before its hurtful pirouette through scabs that had just begun to rest.” From the outset, Oloruntoba signals that this will not be a gentle excavation.

He refers to his family members not by name but as “the father,” “the mother,” “the siblings”—a clinical register that suggests both detachment and self-protection. A physician by training, he writes with the distance of someone used to assessing pain without being overtaken by it. He recounts a childhood marked by corporal punishment and a father whose cruelty was both theatrical and absolute. As a young man, Oloruntoba sends an email confronting his father, hoping to begin a reckoning. Instead, his father convenes a family meeting, distributes printed copies of the email, and demands agreement from the others. No one speaks up, and Oloruntoba is left to apologize. Years later, he reflects on the damage and wonders if a happy Christmas together might still be possible. “What can I, or could I, or should I do?” he asks—not seeking resolution, but holding space for the question.

It’s rare to find a holiday book that resists the expectation of comfort. Better Next Year is one such example. These stories sit with estrangement, failed reconciliations, uneasy rituals, and trauma. The holidays here are not transformed into something redemptive—they remain difficult, shaped by what each writer brings to them. The collection instead offers a kind of honesty that’s hard to come by in seasonal writing: the understanding that some Christmases are just shitty, and that it’s still okay to hope that next year might not be.

*

Selena Mercuri is Reviews Editor at The New Quarterly, a publicist at River Street, and a social media associate at The Rights Factory. Her writing has appeared in The Fiddlehead, Literary Review of Canada, Prairie Fire, and The Ampersand Review, among others. She received the 2023 Norma Epstein Foundation Award for Creative Writing and is currently an MFA candidate in Creative Writing at the University of Guelph. Find her on Instagram: @selenamercuriwriter. [Editor’s Note: Selena Mercuri has reviewed Shani Mootoo, Sarah Louise Butler and Diana Stevan for The British Columbia Review.]

*

The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster