On Christmas Eve during Prohibition, a burglar named Dancing Dan drinks hot Tom and Jerrys at Good Time Charley's speakeasy with the narrator and the proprietor. Dan has been courting Miss Muriel O'Neill, a nightclub worker, despite the dangerous attention of Heine Schmitz, a violent Harlem mobster who considers her his own. As the evening wears on and the liquor flows, Dan arrives with a suspiciously heavy package, and Ooky—a down-and-out porter still wearing his Santa Claus costume from his advertising job—stumbles in and passes out. What begins as a drunken Christmas celebration becomes something more complicated when Dan gets an idea about how to impress Miss Muriel, one that mixes his criminal instincts with an unexpected impulse toward kindness.

Publication: "Dancing Dan's Christmas," first published December 21, 1932 (Collier's magazine); collected in Furthermore (1938).

Author: Damon Runyon (1880–1946), American journalist and short-story writer known for his Broadway underworld tales written in present-tense slang. His stories inspired the musical Guys and Dolls.

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