Poor Michael Furey… He said he did not want to live.

Today we are taking a page out of the playbook of the second best blog on these here internets, FiftyTwoStories.com, and talking about … a short story. But not just any short story. Possibly the greatest short fiction ever written (apologies to “A Perfect Day for Bananafish”).

Why you ask? Because today is January 6th. In addition to being the day Nancy Kerrigan went and got herself clubbed, Mother Teresa arrived in Calcutta and Joan of Arc being born in Domrémy, January 6th is known through all of Ireland as Little Christmas or The Feast of the Epiphany. It was this night, in 1904, that the Morkan sisters threw their annual holiday party where

Lily, the caretaker’s daughter, was literally run off her feet.

And so begins James Joyce’s “The Dead.”

Here is a story that captures the holiday season as none other can. A packed house on a cold, snowy night. Music and singing and dancing and food. A middle-aged man breaking the promise to his mother of not getting drunk again. A dozen or so young women fearful of spinsterhood approaching. Dinner conversations of music and travel, religion and an increasing lack of it, politics and the decreasing amount of rights and freedoms, traditions and the younger generation’s lack of interest in them. And more politics. And more religion.

But above all else, there is the ghost of the past. The remembrance of a life cut short. The ultimate act of love.

Poor Michael Furey… He said he did not want to live.

And the realization – the epiphany – that the great life you are living should have belonged to someone else.

Generous tears filled Gabriel’s eyes. He had never felt like that himself towards any woman but he knew that such a feeling must be love. The tears gathered more thickly in his eyes and in the partial darkness he imagined he saw the form of a young man standing under a dripping tree. Other forms were near. His soul had approached that region where dwell the vast hosts of the dead. He was conscious of, but could not apprehend, their wayward and flickering existence. His own identity was fading out into a grey impalpable world: the solid world itself which these dead had one time reared and lived in was dissolving and dwindling.

Read “The Dead” or visit it and celebrate January 6th.