Modern Christmas tale

The article analyzes “The Christmas Miracle” collection of stories by different authors, published in 2016. The author considers the signs of a Christmas story suggested by Nikolay Leskov in Russian literature and their manifestation in a number of works of the collection. The article highlights the idea of sympathy or compassion, reviews the correlation with events confined to Christmas, reveals the motive of miraculous healing of the soul or the salvation of a child which completes the story with a happy ending. It also proposes a classification of stories into those in which the characters are adults, and the change of their souls occurs as a result of an accident, and those in which the hero is a child suffering from the fault of adults and finding salvation. In general, the features of the Christmas story can be found in modern works, but high artistic merit are not always present