Remember being a kid at Christmas, looking forward to gifts? Even if you weren't taught the Santa story, it was a special time. Even if times were tough, your mom and/or dad probably went without something else to get you a little treat, even if it was only a coloring book and crayons, or a little doll or a Hot Wheels car. When things got bad, maybe a relative or a church group filled in.
But as you got older, if you were lucky, you learned the real truth: You could be Santa, and make other people happy. Remember the words of the mail carrier Kluger in Santa Claus is Comin' to Town? At the end he addresses people who pooh-pooh Christmas and offers this: "But what would happen if we all tried to be like Santa and learned to give as only he can give: of ourselves, our talents, our love and our hearts? Maybe we could all learn Santa's beautiful lesson and maybe there would finally be peace on Earth and good will toward men."
This month's books are all about the joy of giving.
Chicken Soup for the Soul: Christmas Treasury for Kids, edited by Jack Canfield, Mark Victor Hansen, Patty Hansen, and Irene Dunlap
Think of this as an Advent calendar in a book. The 25 stories can be read once a night through Christmas. They all involve children in some way, whether it's a story told by a child (about half the stories were written by tweens or teens) or by an adult reminiscing about an event that happened in childhood. They're all heartwarmers, including the one about the elderly dog, which didn't seem to fit with the theme, but was an "awwww" nevertheless. The book also contains little comic strips like "Dennis the Menace" and "Family Circus" that fit the holiday theme. Most of the stories are about kids learning it's better to give than to receive, and really touch your heart.
A Louisa May Alcott Christmas, edited by Raina Moore
Louisa May Alcott Christmas Treasury, edited by Stephen W. Hines
Back in the 1990s, Stephen Hines made a stir in the historical community by resurrecting Laura Ingalls Wilder's "Missouri Ruralist" farm wife columns in a set of books. In 1999, he rediscovered a Louisa May Alcott Christmas novella, "Patty's Place," about an orphaned girl looking for a family to love her, in an old children's magazine, and published it as The Quiet Little Woman, with two other Christmas tales, "Rosa's Tale," about a horse who tells her story to the female protagonist on Christmas Eve when animals can talk, and "Tilly's Christmas," about a poor girl who takes in an injured bird on Christmas Eve. Alcott was very much in the news at that point as one of her previously unknown adult "blood and thunder" stories had been found and recently published. A few years later, Hines published "Kate's Choice," another story with Christmas providing the pivotal scene (a story a bit akin to Eight Cousins) with two other Alcott Christmas stories, and finally a third book of three stories.
In 2002, the aformentioned six stories as well as some others, for a total of nineteen stories and poems, were published as Louisa May Alcott's Christmas Treasury. Two years later, Harper Festival paperbacks published A Louisa May Alcott Christmas with twenty stories and poems.
The two books have some overlap: the same ten stories appear in both. One story is known as "What Love Can Do" in the Hines book and "How It All Happened" in the Harper paperback, and the wording is slightly different. (Several of the stories are "adapted" by Hines, which I find irritating; I didn't need the original stories to be modified; the most egregious of these is "What Love Can Do," where Hines changes the name of a character—why?) The Harper paperback "cheats" a bit since the first two stories, "An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving" and "The Silver Party," are actually Thanksgiving stories, and there is a piece called "Cousin Tribulation's Story" taking place on New Year's Day, that recounts the real-life Alcott girls giving up their holiday breakfast to a poverty-stricken family, which later made its appearance in Little Women as a tale of the March girls giving away their breakfast, with the father character not appearing.
The collection in the Hines' book is slightly marred by his heavy-handed afterwards to several of the stories where he moralizes endlessly by explaining what Alcott was trying to get across and comparing the situations in her stories to her real-life. Very snooze-making and I don't think Alcott requires afterwards to explain herself! (In fact, I think she'd have been rather indignant.) One of the stories in the Hines' volume is the Christmas chapter from Little Women and "Becky's Christmas Dream" is curious in that it's the same basic story as "Patty's Place/A Quiet Little Woman," but shorter and with fantasy dream elements where Patty's story is played straight. "Gwen's Adventure in the Snow" is also misplaced, as it is not a Christmas story, but simply a winter story.
Together the books make a veritable feast of Louisa May Alcott Christmas goodness, either tales of wealthy girls (and one little boy) helping those poorer than themselves, or of earnest poor children trying to make a Christmas for younger brothers or sisters. The one exception is "Mrs. Podger's Teapot," the delightful story of a middle-aged widow and the bachelor partner of her deceased husband trying to "make Christmas" for a half-starved street boy, and finding something else altogether (it has an almost Dickensian touch). Both worth finding, or look for the stories online, most of them, including "Patty's Place," are on Gutenberg.org in Alcott's short story collections.
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