Derpi

Hello, eriklysaker! Wisegirl22 here to review your short story on this fine Review Day!

First sentence. It's a little rocky with the grammar. "Are" should be "is", and since we don't know "the" Christmas lights that you're talking about (like there's some special ones in this story), "the Christmas lights" should be just "Christmas lights".

"There are something majestic about the Christmas lights."

So, in this section I pasted, we see James feels a cool winter breeze. However, you say it is "smashing" against his face, which makes me get the feeling the cool winter breeze isn't such a breeze anymore, it's a gale. So maybe you should fix the word choice.

"He opened the door to his tiny balcony and he felt the cool winter breeze smashing against his face."

So here are some grammatical errors. There should be a comma after "dates", and you spelled "eventually" wrong.

"They had a few dates but eventualy they found out that they weren’t the best match."

This sentence deserves a nitpick from me about word choice. "Got" isn't the best word to use in this situation. How about "put".

"He got his coat on and left."

In this sentence, I think there should be an "at" between "10" and "left".

"He left 10 p.m. and fell asleep as soon as he reached his bed."

Here, you say "wishing". But, it should be "wished".

"He lifted his glass of wine and wishing for Mary to come back to his loving arms."

Okay, so, so far, a lot of the sentences you wrote are very chopped up, and I keep expecting more use of commas or semicolons, if you must. You could combine some of your sentences using said punctuation marks, and I think the readers would get the flow better. In this particular sentence, though, "got" should be "get".

"He didn’t even got any presents!"

In the third to last paragraph, I get the hint that Mary died in a house fire. I like that. That tells me you show instead of tell, and that's good, for an author. The last few paragraphs were extremely emotional, and I feel bad for James, but the misspelling of "the" at the end sort of killed the mood. Please fix that. I think this was an amazing piece overall, just needs some details. You're great with the plot. This idea was nice; maybe it could turn into a story. Have a great evening and a belated Merry Christmas to you! Keep writing!

-wisegirl22

Hello!
I'm here to read and review.
It's easy to feel bad for James, and root for him for trying to pull through Christmas. It is refreshing to read about the other side of the Season, for those of us who are haunted by loss.

Nitpicks here

1.

Last year, on the 23th of Decmber his wife, Mary, had left him. And he missed out on the Christmas, but now he was ready to catch up.

The next day was the worst he had on many months. It was exactly one year since he got abandoned. This year had been the loneliest he had experienced in his whole life. At the moment, he didn’t have one single friend.

He took out a beautiful rose from his coat and layed it down in front of the tombstone before he raised up.