by Joe Wheeler
Although it was late when finally the few nuts had been fastened on the tree, the rosettes adjusted, and the tree returned to the workbench, yet Codray took time to set the sponge for the day-before-Christmas baking and Johannes laid the fire in the adobe stove, before they retired.
The next morning, after a breakfast of milk and “Gritz,” Bevela and Katya, quivering with excitement, did the dishes to the tunes of “O du fröhliche” and “Von Himmel hoch” while their mother tended to the bread sponge. The singing was interrupted with many giggles and squeals of delight. For every time the dough gave a squeak as their mother worked it down, the girls had to join in and exclaim over how light and fine the Christmas goodies were going to be.
The white flour was very low in the barrel, but since it was Christmas and there was so little with which to celebrate, Codray trusted that the good Father in heaven would stretch the flour as He had the widow’s supply of meal, and let them celebrate with extra goodies for the children and for the stranger who might come their way. What fun the two little sisters had putting raisin eyes on the dolls and animals and doves of peace that their mother made from dough. For the gifts that Codray desired to give and could not, she baked a dough replica and gave it in edible form.
In the middle of the afternoon, when the little sisters felt they could no longer be on their best behavior, there was a loud knocking on the door and Pelznickel with book and switch came in. He questioned the little girls about their conduct and examined them in their ABC’s, asked what church hymns they could sing, whether they were learning to read and write and had started the shorter catechism. Having received favorable answers and impressions, Pelznickel gave each a few candies and nuts and a dove of peace carrying a little willow twig in its mouth. Since they were such good, studious children, he assured them, “Kristkindle will remember you on the morrow.”
Kristkindle came while the children slept.
On Christmas morning the little willow Christmas tree had a surprising array of gifts. Some looked so good that the children not only wanted to, but could eat them. Everyone had been remembered. Even the dog, Watch, had not been forgotten. When the children took him his cake of bran, it looked so appetizing that they shared it with him.
What a blessed Christmas morning! Cold and sparkling outside. Everything transformed with white shining brightness. The dry grass that had given the soddie a wild, shaggy look now made it look like a white loaf cake covered with coconut frosting. A few, large snowflakes lazily zig-zagged outside the window. The children thought they moved slowly to get a glimpse of the Christmas cheer in the soddie.
The children were delighted with their prairie Christmas tree. No one had ever seen such a tree. Nor such dolls! Dolls that could stand! Three hobby horses went a-prancing! Father taught the children how to spin the tops and blow the whistles. Mother gave each a tiny willow basket of nuts, candy, and cookies. Nowhere in all “Kristkindledom” were there three happier children than in the soddie on the Clear Lake homestead.
By eleven o’clock the Christmas wild goose was roasting merrily in the adobe oven. Toys were laid aside. Since they could not go to the usual eleven o’clock Christmas morning church service, the family gathered around, and Father read the Christmas story, and together they sang the Christmas songs.
What a Christmas celebration! New world willow dolls, willow doll beds, willow whistles, willow tops, willow hobby horses, willow baskets, and a willow tree—a new world willow Christmas symphony, but the old world Christmas story and the old world Christmas songs.
And so it was “on Christmas day in the morning” out on the Dakota prairie in 1874.
The Gift of
the Magi
O. HENRY
Whenever Christmas stories are shared, there are a few (so few they may be counted on the fingers of one hand) that, like cream, invariably rise to the top. Very few stories survive the generation they are written for; and fewer yet are alive for a third. Thus, to be around for a fourth presupposes an intangible something that remains undefinable. Of these lonely holdouts none is more beloved than this story.
William Sidney Porter, of Greensboro, North Carolina, became famous as O. Henry, chronicling those people forgotten by the literati. Society columnists might glorify the “400” elite who were worthy to be invited to a Vanderbilt fete, but, to O. Henry, the really important New Yorkers were the 4,000,000 who weren’t invited. Representative of these 4,000,000 are the young and so very poor Mr. and Mrs. James Dillingham Young. No more unlikely candidates to Magi-hood could one imagine.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And 60 cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
There was clearly nothing to do but flop down on the shabby little couch and howl. So Della did it. Which instigates the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating.
While the mistress of the home is gradually subsiding from the first stage to the second, take a look at the home. A furnished flat at $8 per week. It did not exactly beggar description, but it certainly had that word on the lookout for the mendicancy squad.
In the vestibule below was a letter-box into which no letter would go, and an electric button from which no mortal finger could coax a ring. Also appertaining thereunto was a card bearing the name “Mr. James Dillingham Young.”
The “Dillingham” had been flung to the breeze during a former period of prosperity when its possessor was being paid $30 per week. Now, when the income was shrunk to $20, the letters of “Dillingham” looked blurred, as though they were thinking seriously of contracting to a modest and unassuming D. But whenever Mr. James Dillingham Young came home and reached his flat above he was called “Jim” and greatly hugged by Mrs. James Dillingham Young, already introduced to you as Della. Which is all very good.
Della finished her cry and attended to her cheeks with the powder rag. She stood by the window and looked out dully at a gray cat walking a gray fence in a gray backyard. Tomorrow would be Christmas Day, and she had only $1.87 with which to buy Jim a present. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only $1.87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim. Many a happy hour she had spent planning for something nice for him. Something fine and rare and sterling—something just a little bit near to being worthy of the honor of being owned by Jim.
There was a pier glass between the windows of the room. Perhaps you have seen a pier glass in an $8 flat. A very thin and very agile person may, by observing his reflection in a rapid sequence of longitudinal strips, obtain a fairly accurate conception of his looks. Della, being slender, had mastered the art.
Suddenly she whirled from the window and stood before the glass. Her eyes were shining brilliantly, but her face had lost its color within 20 seconds. Rapidly she pulled down her hair and let it fall to its full length.
Now, there were two possessions of the James Dillingham Youngs in which they both took a mighty pride. One was Jim’s gold watch that had been his father’s and his grandfather’s. The other was Della’s hair. Had the Queen of Sheba lived in the flat across the air-shaft, Della would have let her hair hang out the window some day to dry just to depreciate Her Majesty’s jewels and gifts. Had King Solomon been the janitor, with all his treasures piled up in the basement, Jim would have pulled out his watch every time he passed, just to see him pluck at his beard from envy.
So now Della’s beautiful hair fell about her rippling and shining like a cascade of brown waters. It reached below her knees and made itself almost a garment for her. And then she did it up again nervously and quickly. Once she faltered for a minute and stood still whil
e a tear or two splashed on the worn red carpet.
On went her old brown jacket; on went her old brown hat. With a whirl of skirts and with the brilliant sparkle still in her eyes, she fluttered out the door and down the stairs to the street.
Where she stopped the sign read: “Mme. Sofronie. Hair Goods of All Kinds.” One flight up Della ran, and collected herself, panting. Madame, large, too white, chilly, hardly looked the “Sofronie.”
“Will you buy my hair?” asked Della.
“I buy hair,” said Madame. “Take yer hat off and let’s have a sight at the looks of it.”
Down rippled the brown cascade.
“Twenty dollars,” said Madame, lifting the mass with a practiced hand.
“Give it to me quick,” said Della.
Oh, and the next two hours tripped by on rosy wings. Forget the hashed metaphor. She was ransacking the stores for Jim’s present.
She found it at last. It surely had been made for Jim and no one else. There was no other like it in any of the stores, and she had turned all of them inside out. It was a platinum fob chain simple and chaste in design, properly proclaiming its value by substance alone and not by meretricious ornamentation—as all good things should do. It was even worthy of The Watch. As soon as she saw it she knew that it must be Jim’s. It was like him. Quietness and value—the description applied to both. Twenty-one dollars they took from her for it, and she hurried home with the 87 cents. With that chain on his watch Jim might be properly anxious about the time in any company. Grand as the watch was, he sometimes looked at it on the sly on account of the old leather strap that he used in place of a chain.
When Della reached home her intoxication gave way a little to prudence and reason. She got out her curling irons and lighted the gas and went to work repairing the ravages made by generosity added to love. Which is always a tremendous task, dear friends—a mammoth task.
Within 40 minutes her head was covered with tiny, close-lying curls that made her look wonderfully like a truant schoolboy. She looked at her reflection in the mirror long, carefully, and critically.
“If Jim doesn’t kill me,” she said to herself, “before he takes a second look at me, he’ll say I look like a Coney Island chorus girl. But what could I do—oh! what could I do with a dollar and eighty-seven cents?”
At 7 o’clock the coffee was made and the frying-pan was on the back of the stove hot and ready to cook the chops.
Jim was never late. Della doubled the fob chain in her hand and sat on the corner of the table near the door that he always entered. Then she heard his step on the stair away down on the first flight, and she turned white for just a moment. She had a habit of saying little silent prayers about the simplest everyday things, and now she whispered: “Please God, make him think I am still pretty.”
The door opened and Jim stepped in and closed it. He looked thin and very serious. Poor fellow, he was only 22—and to be burdened with a family! He needed a new overcoat and he was without gloves.
Jim stopped inside the door, as immovable as a setter at the scent of quail. His eyes were fixed upon Della, and there was an expression in them that she could not read, and it terrified her. It was not anger, nor surprise, nor disapproval, nor horror, nor any of the sentiments that she had been prepared for. He simply stared at her fixedly with that peculiar expression on his face.
Della wriggled off the table and went for him.
“Jim, darling,” she cried, “don’t look at me that way. I had my hair cut off and sold it because I couldn’t have lived through Christmas without giving you a present. It’ll grow out again—you won’t mind, will you? I just had to do it. My hair grows awfully fast. Say ‘Merry Christmas!’ Jim, and let’s be happy. You don’t know what a nice—what a beautiful nice gift I’ve got for you.”
“You’ve cut off your hair?” asked Jim, laboriously, as if he had not arrived at that patent fact yet even after the hardest mental labor.
“Cut it off and sold it,” said Della. “Don’t you like me just as well, anyhow? I’m me without my hair, ain’t I?”
Jim looked about the room curiously.
“You say your hair is gone?” he said, with an air almost of idiocy.
“You needn’t look for it,” said Della. “It’s sold, I tell you—sold and gone, too. It’s Christmas Eve, boy. Be good to me, for it went for you. Maybe the hairs of my head were numbered,” she went on with a sudden serious sweetness, “but nobody could ever count my love for you. Shall I put the chops on, Jim?”
Out of his trance Jim seemed quickly to wake. He enfolded his Della. For 10 seconds let us regard with discreet scrutiny some inconsequential object in the other direction. Eight dollars a week or a million a year—what is the difference? A mathematician or a wit would give you the wrong answer. The magi brought valuable gifts, but that was not among them. This dark assertion will be illuminated later on.
Jim drew a package from his overcoat pocket and threw it upon the table.
“Don’t make any mistake, Dell,” he said, “about me. I don’t think there’s anything in the way of a haircut or a shave or a shampoo that could make me like my girl any less. But if you’ll unwrap that package you may see why you had me going a while at first.”
White fingers and nimble tore at the string and paper. And then an ecstatic scream of joy; and then, alas! a quick feminine change to hysterical tears and wails, necessitating the immediate employment of all the comforting powers of the lord of the flat.
For there lay The Combs—the set of combs, side and back, that Della had worshipped for long in a Broadway window. Beautiful combs, pure tortoise shell, with jeweled rims—just the shade to wear in the beautiful vanished hair. They were expensive combs, she knew, and her heart had simply craved and yearned over them without the least hope of possession. And now, they were hers, but the tresses that should have adorned the coveted adornments were gone.
But she hugged them to her bosom, and at length she was able to look up with dim eyes and a smile and say: “My hair grows so fast, Jim!”
And then Della leaped up like a little singed cat and cried, “Oh, oh!”
Jim had not yet seen his beautiful present. She held it out to him eagerly upon her open palm. The dull precious metal seemed to flash with a reflection of her bright and ardent spirit.
“Isn’t it a dandy, Jim? I hunted all over town to find it. You’ll have to look at the time a hundred times a day now. Give me your watch. I want to see how it looks on it.”
Instead of obeying, Jim tumbled down on the couch and put his hands under the back of his head and smiled.
“Dell,” he said, “let’s put our Christmas presents away and keep ’em a while. They’re too nice to use just at present. I sold the watch to get the money to buy your combs. And now suppose you put the chops on.”
The magi, as you know, were wise men—wonderfully wise men—who brought gifts to the Babe in the manger. They invented the art of giving Christmas presents. Being wise, their gifts were no doubt wise ones, possibly bearing the privilege of exchange in case of duplication. And here I have lamely related to you the uneventful chronicle of two foolish children in a flat who most unwisely sacrificed for each other the greatest treasures of their house. But in a last word to the wise of these days let it be said that of all who give gifts these two were the wisest. Everywhere they are wisest. They are the Magi.
Charlie’s
Blanket
WENDY MILLER
It was a bitterly cold Canadian Christmas. Cold in more ways than one. Mary could see precious little to be thankful for, deserted as they had been by husband and father. Everywhere else but in their dreary little flat, Christmas took the cold away. Worst of all, the deadly acid of bitterness was gradually destroying the forsaken little family.
All but Becky, who was content with but a worn-out rag of a blanket—and Charlie.
Some months ago, as I opened my mail, I noticed a packet from Canada. Wendy Miller, a homemaker from Alberta, in h
er letter, said this about the story she enclosed: “This story really happened. Very few facts are changed at all. I did change our names, because I did not wish our family to be easily recognized. I know it’s true, because I lived it, and Becky is my sister. I realize that the story is not very polished and maybe not even very good. I am not a writer. I do write a lot of stories and poetry, but only for my family; this is the first story I have ever shared with anyone else. The words just kind of went from heart to paper.”
Mrs. Miller was modest. The text that follows needed very little editing. And the story … well, I guess the fact that it leapfrogged over all those other stories by well-known authors will tell you how it affected me.
Mary hurried to get her children fed and dressed. It was a cold December day, and they had a long way to walk. Mary cleaned houses five days a week; it was the only work she could find that would allow her to also take care of her three small girls at the same time. She would drop the older two off at the elementary school and take 3-year-old Becky with her. The girls came to her for lunch, and she would be back home again before they were home from school in the afternoon. It was a good arrangement, and it kept her off welfare. She wanted help from no one.
“Becky,” she called, “hurry; we’re all ready to go!”
Becky ran to the door, a ragged doll with all its hair loved off cradled in her arms. “I’m all ready, Mama, but we forgot to dress Charlie.”
Mary glanced at the clock and back down at her daughter’s smiling face. Quickly she dressed the doll, wrapped it in its blanket, and handed it back to Becky. Then the little family went out into the cold, dark early morning.
“Mama,”—Laura, 7, and the oldest, took Mary’s hand—“I’m sorry I forgot Charlie. Are we awfully late?”