Christmas Tales and Stories (Barnes & Noble Digital Library)

By Louisa May Alcott and Laura Ciolkowski

This edition includes a modern introduction and a list of suggested further reading.

From the beloved writer of Little Women comes this enchanting collection of Christmas stories. Louisa May Alcott crafts classic tales of how the holidays were spent in nineteenth-century America. Sharing these stories with loved ones will be a welcome addition to your holiday celebrations.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Barnes & Noble
• Release date: Mar 13, 2012
• ISBN: 9781411467460

Louisa May Alcott

Louisa May Alcott was a 19th-century American novelist best known for her novel, Little Women, as well as its well-loved sequels, Little Men and Jo's Boys. Little Women is renowned as one of the very first classics of children’s literature, and remains a popular masterpiece today.

Book preview

CHRISTMAS TALES AND STORIES

LOUISA MAY ALCOTT

EDITED AND WITH AN INTRODUCTION BY LAURA CIOLKOWSKI

Introduction and Suggested Reading © 2009 by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

This 2012 edition published by Barnes & Noble, Inc.

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise, without prior written permission from the publisher.

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ISBN: 978-1-4114-6746-0

INTRODUCTION

A poor woman in Ill. writes me to send her children some Xmas gifts, being too poor & ill to get any. They asked her to write to Santa Claus & she wrote to me. Sent a box & made a story about it. $100.

—LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, December 1881¹

LIKE SO MANY OF THE OTHER ASSORTED BITS AND PIECES OF LOUISA May Alcott's life, both ordinary and extraordinary, this anecdote of a famous author and a poor woman's Christmas wish became the kernel of a story. Bertie's Box, first published in 1884 in the January issue of Harper's Young People, combines several of the tested and true ingredients of Alcott's Christmas fiction—a poor mother in desperate need of some holiday magic (My husband is dead, my money is gone. I am sick, alone, and in need of everything, she pleads) and a wealthy, young benefactor imbued with the Christmas spirit. But the story is more than just a quirky translation of life into fiction whereby Alcott becomes Mrs. Field, the secretary of a great charitable society and the poor woman in Illinois who writes to the great author in Massachusetts becomes an impoverished widow in Iowa (a relatively provincial woman like Alcott, who traveled some, but who spent the lion's share of her life in or near Concord, Massachusetts, might not have made much of a distinction between Iowa and Illinois). It also embodies the literary and personal themes that consistently commanded Alcott's attention and that invariably found their way into her holiday fiction: rising and falling fortunes; the moral obligation of hard work and honest labor; sympathy for others and a practical Christianity² that was linked not to institutionalized religion or to material wealth, but to a willingness to help those in need.

Long before Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888) published Little Women, the best-selling novel that she dubbed her first golden egg, Alcott had been working steadily to make a living as a writer. From the early 1850s when she sold her first short story (Alcott was paid $5 by the Boston Methodist paper The Olive Branch for The Rival Painters, published in 1852), Alcott could be depended on to deliver novels, poems, and children's stories like those collected in her first published book, Flower Tales (1854), written for Concord neighbor Ralph Waldo Emerson's daughter Ellen. By the 1860s, after many years of the kind of hard grubbing³ that characterizes the efforts of poor girls from Christmas stories like Little Robin (1886), Sophie's Secret (1883), and Tessa's Surprises (1868), Alcott's literary labors finally paid off. Hospital Sketches, published in 1863 and based on Alcott's experiences as a Union Army nurse, put the still largely unknown authoress on the map. Alcott emerged a new star⁴ in the shifting galaxy of nineteenth-century letters and then, just five years later, Little Women turned the star into a full-blown celebrity. In 1863 Alcott marveled: "A year ago I had no publisher & went begging with my wares; now three have asked me for something, several papers are ready to print my contributions & F. B. S[anborn] says 'any publisher this side Baltimore would be glad to get a book.'" By 1868, the author of Little Women was pursued by a wide variety of admirers who could not get enough of Miss Alcott: Reporters sit on the wall and take notes; artists sketch me as I pick pears in the garden; and strange women interview Johnny⁵ as he plays in the orchard. It looks like impertinent curiosity to me; but it is called 'fame,' and considered a blessing to be grateful for, I find.⁶ In spite of her misgivings about the assault on privacy in the life of a newly rich and famous author, Alcott remained deeply grateful for her popularity and proud of her ability to support her family, pay debts, and provide for others with her scribbling. In 1865 she writes, "Wrote a new novelette for [Flag of Our Union editor James] Elliott, 'A Marble Woman' & got $75 for it with which I made things comfortable at home with wood, coal, flour, clothes &c. In her journals and letters, Alcott's desire to become a great author—I hope I shall yet do my great book, for that seems to be my work, she confesses—is rivaled by her attention to the dollar value of her labor and the sums of money she earns not just as a writer, but also as a governess, nurse, actress, seamstress, and schoolteacher. The $100 receipt for Bertie's Box would have been carefully recorded in the ledger she kept side-by-side with her journals and in identical notebooks filled with annual accounts of her earnings. Like Lu in The Little Red Purse(1887) and Effie in A Christmas Dream and How It Came True (1885), Alcott would have felt in the desperate appeal of the poor woman from Illinois an intensely personal satisfaction in finally being able to act the part of Santa Claus to someone in need. And like Tilly, the poor but industrious girl from Sophie's Secret (1883) who sells flowers and seashells to earn enough money to pay for her own education, Alcott would have heard in the tinkling of money in the bank the sweetest music." Tilly exhibited the personal strength and female independence that Alcott strove for and also came to embody for her devoted readers.

Alcott had very good reason to keep one eye always on her account ledgers. The second of four daughters (Anna, Louisa, Lizzie, and May were the models for the March sisters Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy of Little Women), Alcott grew up in a family led by the pioneering educator, reformer, and transcendentalist thinker Amos Bronson Alcott. Bronson was an earnest but ineffective philosopher-patriarch, who talked, preached and meditated while his wife took in boarders and his daughters sewed, taught school, kept house for others and governessed to keep the household running. In Alcott's summary Notes and Memoranda for 1852, she writes: Father idle, mother at work in the office, Nan & I governessing, Lizzie in the kitchen, Ab doing nothing but grow. Hard times for all.

These were difficult years for the Alcotts. In 1853, Bronson left the family and embarked on a four-month journey out west, thanks to the gift of eighteen dollars from his famous Concord neighbor and friend Ralph Waldo Emerson. He traveled hundreds of miles in order to attract support for his transcendentalist philosophy and reform-minded ideas. But in spite of Bronson's labors, he always managed to come back home to his family with empty pockets. Alcott records one of many homecomings this way:

We fed and warmed and brooded over him, longing to ask if he had made any money, but no one did till little May said, after he had told all the pleasant things, Well, did people pay you? Then, with a queer look, he opened his pocketbooks and showed one dollar, saying with a smile that made our eyes fill, Only that! My overcoat was stolen, and I had to buy a shawl. Many promises were not kept, and traveling is costly; but I have opened the way, and another year shall do better.

The ever-practical Louisa recognized early on the insurmountable difficulty of making daily bread for the family out of what she later described as her father's poetic idleness. Drawing a striking contrast between herself and her father, Alcott writes in her journal in 1855, Won't go home to sit idle while I have a head and a pair of hands.

Indeed, Alcott lived her life, in the deepest sense, in opposition to her father's perceived idleness, although she sustained an enormous, if ambivalent respect for her father's devotion to his work. Her 1874 caricature of Bronson in Transcendental Wild Oats neatly captures the purity of her father's motives but also the degree to which the daughter saw the father as dangerously ill-equipped for life in Victorian America:

He taught with his whole head and heart; planned and sacrificed, preached and prophesied, with a soul full of the purest aspirations, most unselfish purposes, and desires for a life devoted to God and man, too high and tender to bear the rough usage of this world.

Back in 1843, when Charles Dickens was fully occupied with the publication of A Christmas Carol, the little scheme⁷ that sparked an explosion of Christmas tale-telling and left a comfortable space in the holiday market for a self-described mercenary creature⁸ like Alcott, the eleven-year-old Louisa and her family were busy trying to survive the utopian experiment in consociate living that their philosopher-father and his English associate Charles Lane christened Fruitlands. Viciously satirized as Apple Slump by Alcott in Transcendental Wild Oats, Fruitlands set out to establish a self-sufficient community of like-minded thinkers who were called on to live close to nature and in harmony with the primitive instincts of man. The ideal pursued by the group Alcott describes as inspired lunatics, was to live a pure life. The community spurned cotton, silk, and wool clothing as the products of slave-labor, worm-slaughter, and sheep-robbery, preached vegetarianism, the value of cold baths and the philosophical rewards of subsisting on little more than fruit and nuts. Just six months after they arrived, once the Massachusetts winter set in and it became clear that the plenteous orchards […] to be evoked from their inner consciousness would not materialize for the motley group of modern pilgrims, the Alcott family left their grim New Eden and moved back to Concord.

If Bronson was fully absorbed by his mission, as Alcott puts it, to live in Spartan simplicity and build castles in the air at Fruitlands, his wife Abba (Abigail) May most certainly was not. The backbone of the Alcott family, Abba was unconverted but faithful to the end,⁹ stepping in to rescue the family finances by taking in boarders or working outside the home, and quietly but forcefully impressing upon her daughters the importance of charity and good will toward others. Alcott insisted, All the philosophy in our house is not in the study; a good deal is in the kitchen, where a fine old lady thinks high thoughts and does kind deeds while she cooks and scrubs. Abba most perfectly embodied for Alcott the wholesome and selfless values represented by a family like the Bassetts of An Old Fashioned Thanksgiving (1881) who are poor in money, rich in land and love and the courage and devotion of hard-working mothers like Marmee of Little Women, for whom Abba was the model and inspiration.

Alcott aspired to the artistic heights of illustrious family friends like Ralph Waldo Emerson, Henry David Thoreau, and Nathaniel Hawthorne, and the personal accomplishments of James T. Fields, the powerful and opinionated editor of the Atlantic who read Alcott's work and advised, Stick to your teaching; you can't write. But like Charles Dickens before her, Alcott had a finely tuned ear for the various editors and readerships she aimed to please. Partly out of sheer, economic necessity, given her origins in a family she called poor as rats, she had an exceedingly strong sense of the market. Anything to suit customers, she wrote in 1868, as she cheerfully slashed and burned away any offending allusions to the Rebel army or to the Bible in Hospital Sketches.

Fortunately for her beloved but incapable¹⁰ family, Alcott was sufficiently versatile a writer to take advantage of the widening range of outlets in the 1850s, '60s, and '70s for her talents. In the late-1850s and 1860s, Alcott published, anonymously and also pseudonymously as A. M. Barnard, dozens of sensational stories with titles like Thrice Tempted (1866), Behind A Mask (1866), Abbot's Ghost (1866) and Fatal Follies (1868). Spoken like a clear-eyed domestic economist and family breadwinner-patriarch, she confesses to her journal in 1865, fell back on rubbishy tales, for they pay best & I can't afford to starve on praise, when sensation stories are written in half the time & keep the family cosy. Like her alter ego Jo March, Alcott straddles the line between becoming a great writer who has contempt for the lowbrow fiction that may be the only way to pay the bills, and remaining content to live out the no-nonsense wisdom of Abba/Marmee by elevating hard work and self-discipline as the most important, organizing principals of her life. While there is a famine in Kansas we mustn't ask for sugar-plums; Hope, and keep busy, Abba instructs her daughters. In the 1867 Christmas story What the Bells Saw and Said, Alcott publicly (and disingenuously) assumes her place in the moral economy of Victorian America by warning her readers, a sharp attack of mental and moral dyspepsia will soon teach our people that French confectionery and the bad pastry of [Sensation writers like] Wood, Braddon, Yates & Co. is not the best diet for the rising generation.

Always ready to denigrate the value of the thrilling tales, she published in venues like Frank Leslie's Illustrated Newspaper and Flag of Our Union, and to celebrate, instead, the self-sacrifice and discipline required to support her pathetic¹¹ family, Alcott aphorized: All is fish that comes to the literary net. Goethe puts his joys and sorrows into poems; I turn my adventures into bread and butter. The domestic realism, or what Alcott described as the truth to life of fiction such as Little Women is born of this kind of Victorian-era transformation. Upon receiving the proofs of the first volume of Little Women, a novel she insisted she did not enjoy writing, Alcott observed in her journal: It reads better than I expected. Not a bit sensational, but simple and true, for we really lived most of it; and if it succeeds that will be the reason of it.

Alcott's Christmas fiction is a formulaic but satisfying combination of those simple and true details of domestic life, hardship, and poverty that held such personal meaning for Alcott, and the Dickensian magic of the holidays that became a staple of post-Christmas Carol publishing by the latter half of the nineteenth century. In A Christmas Turkey and How It Came (1885), the children in a family that is too poor to bring home a turkey for Christmas dinner, carry baskets and shovel snow to earn enough money to buy a turkey and then watch joyfully as their family troubles are miraculously washed away by the spirit of the holiday that is now merry in spite of poverty and care. In Rosa's Tale (1879), a horse is magically endowed with speech after the clock strikes twelve on Christmas Eve, and tells the story of her equine courage and faithfulness, successfully pleading for the help of a young mistress to rescue her from hardship and to make her Christmas a happy one. In Little Robin, a poor girl puts thoughts of her own safety and comfort aside to aid two children lost in the forest and is rewarded for her marvelous rescue with an equally marvelous gift of Christmas charity: a year's rent from the minister; all manner of warm and comfortable things for Grandma; and […] a scarlet cloak and hood to replace the old gray one burned and torn that night in the wood.

The Christmas stories in this volume return over and again to the hopes and fears, dreams and desires of those, like the younger Alcott, who felt as if their life was hanging in the balance between comedy and tragedy, domestic comfort and financial ruin. In Tilly's Christmas, a poor girl who will have no presents on Christmas rescues an injured bird on a snowy road. Like Dickens' Cratchit family, whose ordinary Christmas goose is celebrated by the family as the best and rarest of all birds, Tilly finds so much joy and satisfaction in the company of her mother and the bird that she barely notices the poverty of the thin slice of bread that is their meal on Christmas Eve: Such a poor little supper, and yet such a happy one; for love, charity, and contentment were guests there, and that Christmas Eve was a blither one than that up at the great house, where lights shone, fires blazed, a great tree glittered, and music sounded, as the children danced and played. As with so many of Alcott's Christmas stories, this one ends with the eleventh-hour magic of holiday charity and a lesson about the pleasure of doing good. Alcott may have expressed her determination to reel off, simmer, and spin away ad libitum¹² her popular blood and thunder tales and annual Christmas stories in order to keep up her steady contribution to what she called with bittersweet humor The Alcott Sinking Fund.¹³ But she was also a true believer of sorts in the clear-eyed and compassionate kitchen philosophy of love, charity and doing good preached by her mother. The gift of toys to ragged children with nothing in their stockings in Bertie's Box; the magic of a tree weighed down with bonbons and sugarplums for orphans who have little that appears sweet and easy in their lives in A Christmas Dream and How It Came True; the toys, books, and candy Lu saves her pennies to purchase for a poor family in The Little Red Purse—each of these stories expresses Alcott's deep-seated belief in the practical Christianity that she associated so closely with her mother. They also play out the contrast between the emptiness and insincerity of the bourgeois wealth that Alcott sought out of necessity but also built her reputation on devaluing, and the richness of a pure and honest heart. In The Little Red Purse, Lu's grandfather plays the part of a reformed Scrooge by confessing, When I was younger, I loved money, and wanted a great deal. I cared for nothing else, and worked hard to get it and did get it after years of worry. But it cost me my health, and then I saw how foolish I had been, for all my money could not buy me any strength or pleasure and very little comfort. In A Country Christmas (1881), the city girl finds contentment once she decides to throw away millions and marry the true and tender farmer she loves. Marmee puts this sentiment clearly into words in Little Women when she tells her girls, I'd rather see you poor men's wives, if you were happy, beloved, contented, than queens on thrones, without self-respect and peace. Like Alcott, who grew up in a home that offered little in the way of money, but, nevertheless, had much love and happiness in it,¹⁴ Alcott's impoverished heroines turn the holidays into another occasion to rediscover the Dickensian Christmas pleasures of selflessness, empathy, and love. An Alcott Christmas is, at heart, a celebration of a common humanity and the often uncomfortable fellowship among those like Lu and Sophie who are called on to give to others, and those like Tilly and Tessa who are in need. As Alcott put it, writing of her parents, if blessings would make them rich, they would be millionaires.

Laura Ciolkowski is Associate Director of the Center for the Critical Analysis of Social Difference at Columbia University. She is Adjunct Assistant Professor of English and Comparative Literature and is on the faculty of the Institute for Research on Women and Gender at Columbia. Her work on Victorian literature and culture has been published in numerous journals, including Studies in the Novel, Victorian Literature and Culture, Genders, and Novel: A Forum on Fiction. She wrote the introduction to the Barnes and Noble edition of Charles Dickens' American Notes for General Circulation (2005).

CONTENTS

I. BERTIE'S BOX

II. LITTLE ROBIN

III. WHAT THE BELLS SAW AND SAID

IV. A MERRY CHRISTMAS

V. A CHRISTMAS DREAM, AND HOW IT CAME TRUE

VI. THE LITTLE RED PURSE

VII. SOPHIE'S SECRET

VIII. A CHRISTMAS TURKEY, AND HOW IT CAME

IX. TESSA'S SURPRISES

X. ROSA'S TALE

XI. A COUNTRY CHRISTMAS

XII. A HOSPITAL CHRISTMAS

ENDNOTES

SUGGESTED READING

CHAPTER ONE

BERTIE'S BOX

A CHRISTMAS STORY

HERE'S A LETTER FOR YOU, MAMA, AND PLEASE, I WANT THE RED picture on it, said little Bertie, as he came trotting into the room where his mother and aunt sat busily putting the last touches to their generous store of Christmas gifts.

Do read it, Jane; my hands are too sticky, said Mrs. Field, who was