Cecelia Ahern’s Every Year celebrates life’s transformative moments
Short story collections often contain a general theme. In Every Year, penned by best-selling author Cecelia Ahern, the themes vary from finding love when you least expect it to losing someone you once cared about due to an unexpected circumstance or personal decisions. But if there’s one message that overlaps, it’s the transformative experience that characters in these stories have to go through.
These experiences vary from the mundane to the celebratory. Reading through the complete nine stories, one can take a hint that there is an overarching theme that connects them despite the diverse experiences of their characters. In the titular short story, which appears first in the book, Ahern gives perspective and voice to the star on top of a Christmas tree. Although inanimate, the star notices the changes that the family undergoes through the years. This family maintains a tradition of decorating the Christmas tree. As the star sees them every year, it notices how the children have grown into adults, how their parents have aged, and how they welcome new members into the family with their spouses and their children. It’s a touching story that defines how we view family gatherings; despite lives going on throughout the year, reunions during holidays will always find a way to make each other feel at home and loved.
Christmas may also resonate in the short story, “The Production Line” where — although not explicitly — Santa Claus is portrayed as an exploitative businessman in light of the capitalism often associated with Christmas. It follows how one worker who maintains his job at a factory that produces items for gifts tries to make sense of his long hours working for a bearded man with a large build. Eventually, he realizes that this is a stepping stone for a more lucrative career — a position where he may find himself in a better circumstance with the culture of labor and the cycle of consumerism and production still ongoing. One might consider this as one of the short stories where Ahern takes on a different route. It adds a bit of criticism to this kind of consumerist culture during Christmas, a social phenomenon that pressures people into buying or receiving gifts. This was a new route for Ahern who is usually famous for her romance flicks for a female readership.
The collection is also ripe with romance in Ahern’s known style. Being the author of the novel-turned-film PS, I love You, Ahern includes in the collection what it feels like to find love, maintain that love, or fall out of it. This is most notable in three of her short stories. In “Next Stop: Table for Two”, a single waitress juggles from one table to the next during her shift on a Valentine’s evening. But when a lone customer tries to take a table for one, her manager prioritizes a couple who comes in later than him. She defends the man by explaining to her manager that it’s a first-come, first-served basis when the couple hasn’t even made prior reservations. The customer then takes his place, and as the story suggests, they may have acquainted later on.
In “The Calling”, a young girl runs away from home to seek for a better life from her hometown. But when she meets someone in a new city, she finds the next phase of her life being in a relationship with him as they age together. “The End”, which experiments on a short story’s basic structure, tells the story of how one couple, due to misunderstanding, go through the bitter moments in their relationship until it falls apart. But although the story starts with the ending, it slowly traces back to the origin of their relationship — from when they first met to when they started living together and eventually got to know each other’s differences.
Like “The End”, some stories in Every Year do not often lead to a happy ending. In “Mallard and May”, tragedy strikes the two lovers when, during their migration out in the wild (and the story will reveal what they are), one meets a gruesome fate that leaves the other completely devastated. This may hint a bit of reality in fiction, but Ahern also offers redemption in another narrative. “Twenty-four Minutes” looks into a character’s deep intuition as he reacts to his employer’s decision. Intent on ending his life and its mundanities, he realizes that he still has many things to live for when he stands on a rail track before a train would hit him.
In Ahern’s Every Year, the prose is light and the messages are easy to digest. If there is one unifying theme among the stories, it would be the concept of finding the profound in life’s moments — whether overlooked or expected. From celebrating Christmas to dating during Valentine’s, or choosing to fix a damaged relationship to moving on, these moments become part of everyone’s lives each year. In the collection, these moments play a part in shaping the characters’ lives — perhaps for the better.
