The Birds' Christmas Carol

Little Carol Bird was born on Christmas Day into a family of great means.  Even though Carol is a sickly, bedridden child, she maintains a cheerful disposition, bringing light and love to everyone around her.  She understands the significance of Christmas Day (Christ's birth, not her own!) and she delights in sharing some of her wealth with the poor neighbor children. 

The Birds' Christmas Carol is written by Kate Douglas Wiggin, whom you might recognize as the author of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm.  It's a lovely short story that I recommend...especially to families with girls.  I never could entice my boys to endure to end!

To give you a "feel" for the book, I have included below a portion of a letter that Carol's beloved and humorous Uncle Jack sent her, announcing his holiday plans:

Wish you a merry Christmas, you dearest birdlings in America!  Preen your feathers, and stretch the Birds' nest a trifle, if you please, and let Uncle Jack in for the holidays.  I am coming with such a trunk full of treasures that you'll have to borrow the stockings of Barnum's Giant and Giantess; I am coming to squeeze a certain little ladybird until she cries for mercy.

Please drop a note to the clerk of the weather, and have a good, rousing snow-storm - say on the twenty-second.  None of your meek, gentle, nonsensical, shilly-shallying snow-storms; not the sort where the flakes float lazily down from the sky as if they didn't care whether they ever got here or not and then melt away as soon as they touch the earth, but a regular business-like whizzing, whirring, blurring, cutting snow-storm, warranted to freeze and stay on!

I should like rather a LARGE Christmas tree, if it's convenient: not one of those "sprigs," five or six feet high, that you used to have three or four years ago, when the birdlings were fairly feathered out; but a tree of some size.  Set it up in the garret, if necessary, and then we can cut a hole in the roof if the tree chances to be too high for the room.

Tell Bridget to begin to fatten a turkey.  Tell her that by the twentieth of December that turkey must not be able to stand on its legs for fat, and then on the next three days she must allow it to recline easily on its side, and stuff it to bursting.

The pudding must be unusually huge, and darkly, deeply, lugubriously blue in color.  It must be so stuck full of plums that the pudding itself will ooze out into the pan and not be brought on to the table at all.  I expect to be there by the twentieth to manage these little things myself, but give you the instructions in case I should be delayed.