“Look!” she whispered, “there’s the last spark! “Wish—quick—wish!”
“I wish,” he said slowly, “—I wish every girl and boy in the world has had as happy a Christmas as I have. I wish—”
But he didn’t get any farther, for the tiny red spark went out quite gently, as if it did not want at all to disturb the little boy in No. 60 and his mother.
[14] Reprinted from “St. Nicholas Magazine” with permission.
NANCY’S SOUTHERN CHRISTMAS[15]
Harriet Prescott Spofford
They had always kept Christmas at home, even if in no very expensive way. On the very last one, Johnny had had his skates, tied to his stocking, and inside it, an orange and nuts and raisins, and some little trick-joke, and a stick of candy; and Robby had had his sled, and Marnie her book, and Bessie her tea-set; and Mr. Murtrie, the father, had a pair of wristers that Nancy had crocheted, and a muffler that his wife had knit; and the mother had a needle-book that Marnie had made, and a bread-plate that Johnny had whittled out, and a piece of jig-saw work from Robby, and a muff from the father. And Marnie had written a poem to Father and Mother, which all the others criticized violently and ruthlessly, but which was privately regarded as a great achievement by every one of them.
But what was there to do here with sleds and skates! Great use for a muff out in the middle of the Texas prairie, to which they had come from the North. Why, yesterday the thermometer was just at summer heat, and roses were blossoming!
At home how gay it was with every one coming and going, with purchases and parcels and merry secrets, with the hanging of the green, with big snow-drifts, and coasting down Long Hill by starlight, with going to church in the forenoon, and coming home to turkey and cranberry sauce, and a pudding in blue flames! Here there was nothing, there was nobody. There wasn’t a shop within a hundred miles, and if there were, there was no money with which to buy anything. For Mr. Murtrie had come to grief in his business, losing, when all debts were paid, everything but this ranch, to which he had brought his family, and where it seemed like a new world.
At first, it had been so novel, no one thought of homesickness. Nancy herself had enjoyed as much as any one the singing of the mocking-birds at night, the flashing of the cardinal’s red wings in the radiant mornings and the bubbling of his song, the fragrance of the jasmines, the beauty of the innumerable flowers, the charm of the wide landscape, the giant trees draped in their veils of gray moss; she had enjoyed hearing the boys tell about the batcaves, with their streams of unnumbered wings going out by dark and coming in by dawn in myriads; she had enjoyed lying awake at night to hear the water gently pouring through the irrigation ditches from the madre ditch, and drowning all the land in its fertilizing flood to the sound of slow music; she had enjoyed watching the long flights of wild ducks; seeing a spot apparently covered with yellow flowers that suddenly turned into a flock of birds that rose and flew away. She had enjoyed the strange cactus growths that seemed to her like things enchanted in their weird shapes by old magicians; she had enjoyed the thickets of prickly pear, the green and feathery foliage of the mesquit bushes, many of them no higher than her head, but with mighty roots stretching far and wide underground, the Indians having burned the tops in their wild raids, year after year, long ago. But now Nancy was longing for the bare branches of her old apple-tree weaving their broidery on the sky, for the young oak by the brook which held its brown leaves till spring, for the wide snow-fields, the shadows of whose drifts were blue as sapphire. She was longing to hear the bells ring out their gladness on Christmas eve and Christmas morning, for the spicy green gloom of the church, for all the happy cheer of Christmas as she had known it. Bells? There wasn’t a bell within hearing; there wasn’t a church, except the ruins of an old Spanish mission three or four miles distant. How could there be Christmas green where there wasn’t a spruce or a fir! There was only this long, dreary prairie of the cattle-range under its burning blue sky. It was the very kingdom of loneliness. Christmas without snow, without an icicle, without whistling winds,—oh, it wasn’t Christmas at all!