Neville, having imagined himself into Barbados while physically asleep in New York, receives a letter and draft from his brother Victor urging him to come home and covering his travel expenses; he sails home and joins the family for a Christmas gathering he had not attended in many years.
Date (happened)
c. December 1933
unresolved
c. December 1933
relative · probable · preferred
Why
The title says 1948; that appears to be an error, filed as an L1 candidate rather than adopted here.
Reasoning
This event is the family's Christmas gathering that followed Victor sending Neville a ticket and draft. hist_event:788, the companion event for the letter/ticket itself, carries six field_date claims converging tightly on December 1933 (including one, d4, sourced from this same witness passage 544820). Nothing in the corpus supports the title's stated year of 1948 anywhere this story is retold. The exact day of the gathering is not given (only that the trip was timed 'in time for Christmas'), hence qualifier=circa with no day.