There’s nothing like the commissioning of a holiday volume to herald a writer’s induction into the CanLit canon. David Adams Richards steps up with the stocking-stuffer-sized The Christmas Tree. The book contains two very short tales (with black-and-white illustrations by Vince McIndoe) in which Adams aims to steer his way into the heart of Christmas – or at least that shadow of it that many of us pursue for the duration of our adult lives.

“Carmichael’s Dog” is a droll Norman Rockwellian look at a magical holiday shared by two fatherless brothers. The story is fairly lightweight – even for a Christmas story – and Adams indulges the sentimental streak that haunts even his best fiction.

The other story, from which the book draws its title, has more teeth. It is the tale of several New Brunswick brothers who take a six-year-old boy on an impromptu road trip to find the perfect Christmas tree. In a possible nod to Oscar Wilde’s story “The Selfish Giant,” the presence of the boy gives the expedition an unexpected poignance.

In spite of its brevity, it is the latter story that responds best to the challenge Richards sets for himself in the book’s introduction: to mine the geography of his past for a defining glimpse of Christmas, about which he writes, “It is, if only for a moment, Joy.”