The Christmas Banquet

The Christmas Banquet is one of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s allegorical short stories, originally published in his 1846 collection Mosses from an Old Manse. The story is a fantasy in the moral allegory mode that Hawthorne worked in across many of his shorter pieces, with the central premise being a recurring annual banquet to which the most miserable people in the world have been invited as guests.

The banquet of the title is held each Christmas under the terms of an unusual will left by a wealthy man who had decided that the Christmas season’s general focus on joy and celebration ignored the wider population of those whose lives had been shaped by particular kinds of profound suffering. Each year a new group of the most miserable people is selected to attend the banquet, with the wider story exploring the various forms of human suffering through the particular guests who attend across the years that the story covers.

Hawthorne uses the recurring banquet structure to develop a long meditation on the nature of human suffering, on the particular forms that unhappiness takes in different lives, and on the question of whether suffering itself can be the basis for community and recognition among those who share it. The story is one of his more morally serious shorter pieces, with the allegorical framework giving him room to engage with the wider theological and philosophical questions about suffering that his major novels also worked through.

For readers coming to Hawthorne through The Scarlet Letter and The House of the Seven Gables, The Christmas Banquet shows him at his most directly allegorical. For students of nineteenth century American literature or of Hawthorne’s wider catalogue, the story is essential.