Rituals to Observe: Stories about Holidays from the Flannery O'Connor Award for Short Fiction

These stories amount to something more than a celebration of the holidays dotting our calendars from month to month.

Even though holidays can occasion a return to the familiar, these stories challenge traditional associations.

Each story serves to complicate how we observe the human observation of holidays and offers a nuanced understanding of related themes such as family and motherhood, travel, grief and mourning processes, and memory.

More generally, holidays are days of observance, and that aspect alone offers a lot to unpack.