The Long Christmas Dinner - nine decades long in just One Act - showcases the lives of several generations of the Bayard family. Wilder breaks the boundaries of time as we measure it, and invites us to partake in “one long, happy Christmas dinner” - past, present and future. As generations appear, have children, wither, and depart, only the audience sees what changes and what remains the same.

”Every last twig is wrapped around with ice. You almost never see that,” young Genevieve marvels, not realizing her mother made this same observation years earlier, and that one day her daughter-in-law will do the same.