Christmas

Christmas is both the occasion that brings Emmi Rothner and Leo Leike into contact and a recurring measure of how far their correspondence has moved beyond an ordinary greeting. What begins with a mass email and a dispute over holiday formulae becomes entangled with Leo’s breakup with Marlene, Emmi’s growing expectation of his replies, and the intimacy they build through written exchange. Its familiar seasonal language supplies the novel with an ironic refrain: the words are conventional, but the consequences of sending and receiving them are not.

The greeting that starts a correspondence

Emmi’s Christmas mass email reaches Leo by accident, but he answers with genuine appreciation for its warmth and originality. Their opening exchange quickly turns the greeting itself into a subject. Emmi explains that Leo’s address entered her contacts by mistake while she was trying to cancel a subscription, and says she will delete him; at the same time, she invites him to propose a more original way of wishing people well. Until then, she repeats the conventional Christmas and New Year greeting, converting a formula into a playful challenge.

Leo’s reply gives the accidental contact room to continue. Emmi later teases him about what she calls his fixation on round-robin Christmas emails, arguing that his assumptions about her age based on the phrasing are unreliable. Their discussion of wording becomes a means of testing one another: Leo reads personality and age into language, while Emmi questions those deductions and offers details that complicate them. The holiday greeting is no longer merely a message sent to a list; it is the first shared reference around which an increasingly individual exchange takes shape.

Christmas and Leo’s lost chance with Marlene

The holiday’s significance sharpens when Leo tells Emmi what happened with Marlene. After five years of repeatedly separating and starting again, their relationship has reached a decisive break: Marlene has found someone else, and Leo, afraid of losing her, tries to persuade her to give them one final chance. He hopes they will spend Christmas in Paris and plans to propose there. Marlene first says she will wait to speak to the other man before deciding, then writes that Paris would only be another lie and that she cannot go through with it.

Leo waits for a reply to his own plea, setting himself a 9:00 p.m. deadline for the last possibility of Paris. At 8:57, a new-message alert appears. Expecting Marlene’s agreement, he opens it and finds Emmi’s Christmas greeting instead. The collision is precise: a message that means little to its sender arrives at the moment Leo has invested with the outcome of his relationship. He later explains that this is why he reacted so strongly to the familiar seasonal formula. Christmas becomes inseparable from an abrupt emotional reversal—not because Emmi intended to intervene in Leo’s relationship, but because her greeting occupies the place where he expected Marlene’s answer.

From seasonal exchange to emotional expectation

The correspondence that begins around Christmas acquires its own calendar of expectation. When Leo is silent for three days, Emmi writes that she wonders why and feels that something is missing, and asks him to put matters right. The seasonal exchange has thus given way to an ongoing attachment whose pressure can be registered in the interval between messages. Leo, in turn, asks directly whether Emmi wants him to keep writing, making continuation an explicit question rather than an assumption.

Later, Emmi describes opening her inbox to find a message from Leo as the beginning of a good day, and a day without one as a bad day. She says she is becoming addicted to the correspondence and wants to stop waiting for a man who does not want to meet her. Leo answers by asking whether she wants to know him in person. These exchanges extend the Christmas opening’s central pattern: messages create closeness, while delay and absence expose how much each correspondent has come to depend on that closeness.

A seasonal motif in a changing medium

Christmas belongs to a novel told through messages, so its recurring force comes not only from the date but from the form of communication. The initial greeting travels as email; later, Leo describes his mother’s death and says that writing to Emmi has restored the inner voice that counters his loneliness. Their contact also approaches the limits of the written medium: a later message bears the subject line “Our voices,” and Leo’s invitation to meet presses the relationship toward physical presence. The movement from holiday email to voice and attempted meeting makes the original seasonal exchange look like the first step in a larger change of medium and intimacy.

The formula also persists against very different emotional circumstances. Leo’s early joke about the greeting is rooted in the night he mistakes Emmi’s message for the answer that might save his relationship with Marlene. Later, their exchanges include urgent invitations, uncertainty about meeting, and the disappearance of Leo’s email address. The returned-mail notice confirms that the channel on which their relationship depends can close without a personal reply. Against that later rupture, Christmas’s conventional wish for renewal carries an irony the opening could not yet contain: the correspondence it initiates becomes intensely important, but the greeting itself promises no stable future.

Narrative significance

Christmas works as a hinge between coincidence and attachment. Its stock wording is repeatedly examined, mocked, and reinterpreted; its first appearance produces a lasting private joke, while its timing gives the phrase an unexpected association with Leo’s lost opportunity to return to Marlene. Because the story is presented through successive messages, the holiday greeting also establishes the basic narrative mechanism: one person sends, another reads, and the gap between what the sender intends and what the recipient is waiting for can transform an ordinary email into a turning point.

The motif’s power lies in that gap. Emmi sends a friendly seasonal message without knowing what Leo is awaiting; Leo receives it as the answer to a crisis it cannot resolve. Their later correspondence makes this mismatch between written words and private stakes recur in new forms. Christmas therefore remains more than a background date: it is the occasion on which an accidental connection begins, and the first instance of the novel’s larger pattern in which an everyday message acquires a weight its sender could not have intended.