"And When They Appear"

I, too, thought of Bradbury with this story . . . http://www.english.bham.ac.uk/ultan/st.htm there's not much more than that, but I provide the link anyway. =mantis=

And the link you provide cites "There Will Come Soft Rains." I actually hadn't been thinking of that one; just the idea of a boy meeting a whole bunch of fictional or legendary Christmas figures on Christmas struck me as very Bradbury-like. Of course, if Bradbury had written it, it would have ended very differently (although he did write some dark stuff early in his career). While I'm thinking of it: the man who takes Sherby is referred to several times as "Corporal Charlie" (as he instructs Sherby) but once as "Uncle Charlie." Is this last a typo? --Adam

'And when they appear' does seem to have something of a Bradbury vibe. ‘There Will Come Soft Rains’ is the obvious choice, but even when I was reading the story for the first time I thought of another: 'Jack-in-the-box', collected in 'The Small Assassin'. That too is a story of a boy living in a house that is at once his whole world and his prison. Like House, the boy’s mother wants to keep her little boy from going out into the real world. House uses holograms, she uses lies. Both stories share the sense that the protagonist has to escape this situation in order to be fully alive, that Jack can’t stay in his box forever. Both seem to be, among other things, rite-of-passage stories. They’re about the bittersweet process of growing up and leaving behind the world of childhood with all its pretty lies. Wolfe’s story, as I read that ambiguous ending, seems to be saying that we should take something with us from childhood. Sherby isn’t nice to Santa, he doesn’t want to play let’s-pretend any longer, but he’s left at the end wishing that he had.