Charles Dickens didn’t invent Christmas, of course, but he left Tiny Tim’s crutch lying in the hallway for everybody else to trip over. Since 1843, writers have been limping along after the master storyteller, trying to catch a mugful of his ginger-infused sentimentality. For many of us, there is no shorter line to the tear ducts than a child’s imperiled hope for a merry Christmas.

Truman Capote redecorated the tree in 1956 with his tender story about making fruitcakes with his elderly cousin. “We are each other’s best friend,” the narrator explains as they begin gathering “cherries and citron, ginger and vanilla and canned Hawaiian pineapple, rinds and raisin and walnuts and whiskey and oh, so much flour, butter, so many eggs, spices, flavorings.” I don’t even like fruitcake, but I crave their fruitcake. And that final forlorn paragraph of “A Christmas Memory” – “severing from me an irreplaceable part of myself” – still throbs with nostalgia like a childhood scar.

“Brightly Shining,” by Ingvild Rishoi. Translated from Norwegian by Caroline Waight. Atlantic. 182 pages. $20 Courtesy of Grove

“Brightly Shining,” a new novella from Norwegian writer Ingvild Rishoi, belongs to that contra-Dickens genre that wreathes holiday joy with sorrow. It’s not as perfect as Claire Keegan’s 2021 Christmas novella, “Small Things Like These,” but perfection makes for an unfair comparison.

O, come, all ye faithful, to have your hearts broken again.

Rishoi’s story takes place, as such stories must, in the redolent realm of childhood memory. Ronja is a clever 10-year-old girl in Oslo as the city prepares for Christmas. She’s a dreamer and a lover of tales, a preference that’s encouraged by her alcoholic father, who supplies the household with little else. The narrative, translated from the Norwegian by Caroline Waight, plays out as a series of moments and impressions, some polished over time, others as jagged as broken ornaments.

After school one day, Ronja spots a flier on a lamppost: “Wanted: Christmas Tree Seller. You Are: Conscientious. Responsible. Outdoorsy.” On a good day, her father can manage a fair imitation of “outdoorsy,” so she takes the flier home and urges him to apply. Naturally, he regards such work as beneath him – “That’s a job for country bumpkins” – but Ronja is already imagining how her friends will react when her father arrives at school:

“Meron would lean against the window and yell, the Christmas tree is coming! the Christmas tree is coming! Look, it’s Ronja’s dad, yeah! And the teacher says sit, sit, stay in your seats, but everybody runs over to the window, yeah, then everybody runs over to the window, and downstairs we see the head teacher crossing the playground to meet Dad. She’s got her arms clutched around her wool coat. Then she points towards the gym. Her knitted belt is flapping in the wind, and Dad is smiling his big smile, and Dad hauls the tree through the school gate, and everyone in class yells wow.”

That’s on Page 12, and I already feel like I’ve got a pine needle in my eye.

Ronja’s dad can’t withstand her enthusiasm either. The next day he announces he’s got the job. And why not? Selling Christmas trees is perfect for him: It starts at 10 a.m., and it rewards the gift of gab. Soon, he’s a new man, coming home with food and fresh stories about work. “I stared at Dad,” Ronja says, “because miracles do happen.”

“He talked while he washed the saucepan. He talked while I did homework. And while I brushed my teeth, he sat on the toilet lid and talked about the tree farm at Enebakk and the tree farm at Moss and what kind of tree we’d buy, a fjord spruce, if we were lucky and there were any left by the time he’d been paid, and then at last he sat on the edge of the bed and undid the tangles in my hair and talked about silver firs and ordinary firs and Sitka firs and lots of other firs I can’t remember anymore.”

Then, of course, Dad falls off the wagon.

None of that surprises Ronja’s older sister, Melissa. She’s had more time to study the feints and false promises of self-deluded alcoholics. “I don’t want to dream,” she tells Ronja. “I don’t believe anything.”

Ronja doesn’t have that choice. “I can’t not hope,” she says in what might be the story’s most slaying line. “That’s just the way my brain is.”

But Melissa has something better than belief or hope: her own hard work. While Dad slips away on a bender, she takes his place at the Christmas tree stand and tries to wring whatever holiday coin she can from the job.

I can’t say that “Brightly Shining” does for the Christmas tree industry what Upton Sinclair’s “The Jungle” did for the meat industry, but Rishoi’s novella will definitely make you think more compassionately about those raw-handed attendants freezing in parking lots till the angels sing. Working early in the morning and late at night, Melissa endures all the crushing labor uncomplainingly, even while trying to stay in school and keep an eye on her little sister.

Then her manager realizes what a valuable asset Ronja could be. “Do you know who people most want to help at Christmas?” he asks. “Skinny little kids.” In a flash, Ronja becomes the Little Match Girl hawking wreaths to gullible holiday shoppers.

Sugar plums of sweetness keep tempting us to snuggle in with Ronja and believe that “miracles do happen.” But Rishoi deftly lets an adult’s awareness seep through pinholes in Ronja’s childhood faith. By the end, burned hope hangs over these pages like the scent of smoke after a candle’s been blown out.