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“Good! Tea is a man’s drink in cold weather,” Pa told her.
Laura spread the clean white tablecloth, and in the center of the table she set the glass sugar bowl, the glass pitcher full of cream, and the glass spoonholder full of silver spoons all standing on their handles. Around the table Carrie laid the knives and forks, and filled the water glasses, while Laura set all the plates in a pile at Pa’s place. Then at each place, all around the table, she cheerfully put a glass sauce dish holding half a canned peach in golden syrup. The table was beautiful.
Pa and Mr. Boast had washed and combed their hair. Ma put the last empty pot and pan in the pantry, and helped Laura and Mrs. Boast whisk the last full dish to the table. Quickly she and Laura took off their work aprons and tied on their Christmas aprons.
“Come!” said Ma. “Dinner is ready.”
“Come, Boast!” said Pa. “Sit up and eat hearty! There’s plenty more down cellar in a teacup!”
Before Pa, on the big platter, lay the huge roasted rabbit with piles of bread-and-onion stuffing steaming around it. From a dish on one side stood up a mound of mashed potatoes, and on the other side stood a bowl of rich, brown gravy.
There were plates of hot Johnny cake and of small hot biscuits. There was a dish of cucumber pickles.
Ma poured the strong brown coffee and the fragrant tea, while Pa heaped each plate with roast rabbit, stuffing, and potatoes and gravy.
“This is the first time we ever had jack rabbit for Christmas dinner,” Pa said. “The other time we lived where jack rabbits grow, they were too common, we had them every day. For Christmas we had wild turkey.”
“Yes, Charles, and that was the most we did have,” said Ma. “There was no surveyors’ pantry to get pickles and peaches out of, in Indian Territory.”
“Seems to me this is the best rabbit I ever tasted,” said Mr. Boast. “The gravy is extra good too.”
“Hunger is the best sauce,” Ma replied modestly.
But Mrs. Boast said, “I know why the rabbit’s so good. Mrs. Ingalls lays thin slices of salt pork over it when she roasts it.”
“Why, yes, I do,” Ma agreed. “I think it does improve the flavor.”
They all took big second helpings. Then Pa and Mr. Boast took big third helpings, and Mary and Laura and Carrie did not refuse, but Ma took only a bit of stuffing and Mrs. Boast just one more biscuit. “I declare, I’m so full I can’t eat another mouthful,” she said.
When Pa took up the fork from the platter again, Ma warned him. “Save some room, Charles, you and Mr. Boast.”
“You don’t mean there’s more to come?” said Pa.
Then Ma stepped into the pantry and brought out the dried-apple pie.
“Pie!” said Pa, and, “Apple pie!” said Mr. Boast. “Jumping Jehoshaphat, I wish I’d known this was coming!”
Slowly they each ate a piece of that apple pie, and Pa and Mr. Boast divided the one piece left over.
“I never hope to eat a better Christmas dinner,” said Mr. Boast, with a deep sigh of fullness.
“Well,” Pa said. “It’s the first Christmas dinner anybody ever ate in this part of the country. I’m glad it was a good one. In time to come, no doubt a good many folks will celebrate Christmas around here, and I expect they’ll have fancier fixings in some ways, but I don’t know how they can have more solid comfort than we’ve got, for a fact.”
After a while he and Mr. Boast got up reluctantly, and Ma began to clear the table. “I’ll do the dishes,” she said to Laura. “You run help Mrs. Boast get settled.”
So Laura and Mrs. Boast put on their coats and hoods, mufflers and mittens, and went out into the glittering, biting cold. Laughing, they plowed and plunged through snow, to the tiny house nearby that had been the surveyors’ office. At its door Pa and Mr. Boast unloaded the bobsled.
The little house had no floor, and it was so small that the double bedstead just fitted across one end. In the corner by the door Pa and Mr. Boast set up the stove. Laura helped Mrs. Boast carry the feather bed and quilts and make the bed. Then they set the table against the window opposite the stove, and pushed two chairs under it. Mrs. Boast’s trunk squeezed between the table and the bed and made another seat. A shelf above the stove and a box beside it held the dishes, and just room enough was left for the door to open against the table.
“There!” Pa said, when all was done. “Now you folks are settled, come on over. Not even the four of us can get in here, but there’s plenty of room at the other house, so that’s headquarters. How about a game of checkers, Boast?”
“You go along,” Mrs. Boast told them. “Laura and I will come in a minute.”
When they were gone, Mrs. Boast took a full paper bag from under the dishes. “It’s for a surprise,” she told Laura. “Popcorn! Rob doesn’t know I brought it.”
They smuggled the bag into the house and hid it in the pantry, whispering to tell Ma what it was. And later, when Pa and Mr. Boast were absorbed in checkers, quietly they heated fat in the iron kettle and poured in a handful of the shelled popcorn. At the first crackle, Pa looked around quickly.
“Popcorn!” he exclaimed. “I haven’t tasted popcorn since—If I’d known you’d brought popcorn, Boast, I’d have routed it out before now.”
