The Fairies and the Christmas Child

By Lilian Gask
The Illustrations are by Willy Pogány
T. Y. Crowell & Co New York

The worst of being a Christmas Child is that you don’t get birthday presents, but only Christmas ones. Old Naylor, who was Father’s coachman, and had a great gruff voice that came from his boots and was rather frightening, used to ask how I expected to grow up without proper birthdays, and I thought I might have to stay little always. When I told Father this he laughed, but a moment later he grew quite grave.
“Listen, Chris,” he said. And then he took me on his knee—I was a small chap then—and told me things that made me forget old Naylor, and wish and wish that Mother could have stayed with us. The angels had wanted her, Father explained; well, we wanted her too, and there were plenty of angels in heaven, anyway. When I said this Father gave me a great squeeze and put me down, and I tried to be glad that I was a Christmas child. But I wasn’t really until a long time afterwards, when I had found the Fairy Ring, and met the Queen of the Fairies.
This was how it happened. Father and I lived at one end of a big town, in a funny old house with an orchard behind it, where the sparrows ate the cherries and the apple trees didn’t flower. Once upon a time, said Father, there had been country all round it, but the streets and the roads had grown and grown until they drove the country away, and now there were trams outside the door, and not a field to be seen. I often thought that our garden must be sorry to be so crowded up, and that this was why it wouldn’t grow anything but weedy nasturtiums and evening primroses.
Father is a doctor, and most awfully clever. If you cut off the top of your finger, he’d pop it on again in no time, and he used to cure all sorts of illnesses with different coloured medicines he made himself behind a screen.
But though he had lots and lots of patients—sometimes the surgery was full of them, ’specially on cold nights when there was a fire—they didn’t seem to have much money to give him, and sometimes they ran away with their furniture in the night so’s not to pay their bills. This worried Father dreadfully, and even Santa Claus was scared away by the things he said. On Christmas Eve the old fellow quite forgot to fill my stocking. It was all limp and empty when I woke in the morning, and if I hadn’t remembered that when I grew up I was going to be a Commander-in-Chief, I should never have swallowed that lump in my throat.