AllFreeNovel
Share Us
“Yes, Charles, it is,” said Ma. She set the bowl of hot corn meal mush on the table, and poured out the milk. “Come now, and eat. A hot supper will warm you quicker than anything else, Charles.”
At supper they talked about other Christmases. They had had so many Christmases together, and here they were again, all together and warm and fed and happy. Upstairs in Laura’s box there was still Charlotte, the rag doll from her Christmas stocking in the Big Woods. The tin cups and the pennies from Christmas in Indian Territory were gone now, but Laura and Mary remembered Mr. Edwards who had walked forty miles to Independence and back, to bring those presents from Santa Claus. They never had heard of Mr. Edwards since he started alone down the Verdigris River, and they wondered what had become of him.
“Wherever he is, let’s hope he’s as lucky as we are,” said Pa. Wherever he was, they were remembering him and wishing him happiness.
“And you’re here, Pa,” Laura said. “You’re not lost in a blizzard.” For a moment they all looked silently at Pa, thinking of that dreadful Christmas when he almost had not come home and they feared he never would.
Tears came into Ma’s eyes. She tried to hide them, but she had to brush them away with her hand. They all pretended not to notice. “It’s just thankfulness, Charles,” Ma said, blowing her nose.
Then Pa burst out laughing. “That was the joke on me!” he said. “Starving to death for three days and nights, and eating the oyster crackers and the Christmas candy, and all the time I was under the bank of our own creek, not a hundred yards from the house!”
“I think the best Christmas was the time there was the Sunday-school Christmas tree,” said Mary. “You’re too little to remember, Carrie, but Oh! how wonderful that was!”
“It wasn’t really as good as this one,” Laura said. “Because now Carrie is old enough to remember, and now we have Grace.” There was Carrie—the wolf didn’t hurt her. And there on Ma’s lap sat the littlest sister Grace, with her hair the color of sunshine and eyes as blue as violets.
“Yes, this is best after all,” Mary decided. “And maybe next year there’ll be a Sunday-school here.”
The mush was gone. Pa scraped the last drop of milk from his bowl and drank his tea. “Well,” he said, “we can’t have a tree
, for there isn’t so much as a bush on Silver Lake. We wouldn’t want one anyway, just for ourselves. But we can have a little Sunday-school celebration of our own, Mary.”
He went to get his fiddle box, and while Ma and Laura washed the bowls and the pot and set them away, he tuned the fiddle and rosined the bow.
Frost was thick on the windowpanes and frost furred the cracks around the door. Thickly against the clear upper edges of the windowpanes the snowflakes fluttered. But lamplight was bright on the red-and-white tablecloth, and the fire glowed behind the open drafts of the stove.
“We can’t sing so soon after eating,” said Pa. “So I’ll just limber up the fiddle.”
Merrily he played, “Away Down the River on the O-hi-o!” And, “Why Chime the Bells So Merrily.” And,
“Jingle bells, jingle bells,
Jingle all the way!
Oh, what fun it is to ride,
In a one-hoss open sleigh!”
Then he stopped and smiled at them all. “Are you ready to sing now?”
The voice of the fiddle changed; it was going to sing a hymn. Pa played a few notes. Then they all sang:
“Yes, a brighter morn is breaking,
Better days are coming on.
All the world will be awaking
In a new and golden dawn.
And many nations shall come and say,
Come, let us go up to the mountain of the Lord!
And He will teach us, will teach us of His ways,
And we will walk in His paths.”
The fiddle’s voice wandered away, Pa seemed to be playing his thoughts to himself. But a melody grew out of them and throbbed softly until they all joined in and sang:
