Christmas Is a Sad Season for the Poor
by John Cheever (1949)

Christmas is a sad season. The phrase came to Charlie an instant after the alarm
clock had waked him, and named for him an amorphous depression that had troubled
him all the previous evening. The sky outside his window was black. He sat up in
bed and pulled the light chain that hung in front of his nose. Christmas is a
very sad day of the year, he thought. Of all the millions of people in New York,
I am practically the only one who has to get up in the cold black of 6 a.m. on
Christmas Day in the morning; I am practically the only one....