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In a bare little room in the shabbiest house on Division Street a young girl lay in bed day after day, staring wistfully through the flawed window pane at the dingy row of houses opposite. She suffered from hip disease and could not walk, and a frail little mother cleaned offices to support them both. Living was cruelly high and there was no thought of spending anything for Christmas. Martha dreaded its coming, for she could remember other days when Christmas had been very different. Besides, Martha was very lonely. She and her mother were strangers in town, having come only six months before, and in all that time not a soul had come to see them. And because Martha felt so lonely and so left out of the busy, happy world, the treatment for which she had come to the city was doing her no good, and she was not improving at all. And her mother saw the trouble and sorrowed, but did not know how to mend the matter. Martha read in books about the good times girls had together and longed with all her soul to be part of such frolics, until it seemed that she could not bear her loneliness any longer.
Her mother often brought home newspapers from the offices and in them Martha read about the groups of boys and girls who were going through the streets on Christmas Eve singing carols before the houses where the candles shone in the windows.
“How I wish I could hear those carols sung!” she sighed enviously. “How wonderful it must be to be rich and live in a fine house and put a candle in the window to make the singers stop outside! And I must always stay in the darkness, and miss all the fun! Oh, Mother, it isn’t fair!”
The sad-eyed little mother cast about in her mind for some way to amuse her lonely daughter this dreary Christmas Eve. “Let us pretend that we are rich and great,” she said soothingly, “and play that we are putting a lighted candle in our window and listening to the fine songs of the singers below and giving them large sums of money for their good cause.”
“What good would it do to play it?” asked Martha. “We would have to imagine it all. We haven’t even a candle!”
“Let’s play it, anyway,” coaxed her mother. “What color candle shall we use tonight?”
“A red one, with gold designs on it, and a cut glass candlestick,” said Martha, playing the game to please her mother.
So they pretended to set a shining glass candlestick holding a red and gold candle on the window sill. “Now we must wait awhile in our elegant parlor for the singers to come,” said her mother, playing the game with spirit.
Then a wonderful thing happened. There was a sound of footsteps in the creaking snow outside, footsteps that came to a halt beneath the window, and then the air was filled with joyous, ringing melody: