The Birds' Christmas Carol

One very early Christmas morning, a baby girl is born into the Bird family.

The name they had chosen just doesn't seem to fit. A Christmas baby must be carefully and aptly named. As Mrs Bird lies half asleep, listening to the choir's song wafting into her bedroom window from the church next door, it comes to her! This little one will be Carol, like a Christmas Carol of joyful tidings.

Fast forward ten years. For the first five of those, Carol had been a cheerful, happy child who took part in the Christmas/birthday festivities and doted on her older brothers. But for the last five years, she has grown slowly and steadily weaker, not having the strength to go out and play, until she is now an invalid, in the same room where she was born.

Prayers have been said, and doctors have been consulted, but the last doctor, the most famous one, has told them that Carol will “slip quietly off into heaven” within the next year probably. So Mr and Mrs Bird suppress their own sufferings and are cheerful for Carol's sake, and Carol's older brothers do not fight or quarrel for fear of disturbing Carol. They attend to their studies so they may share it with Carol or entertain Carol with a story they learn or read.

And, of course, Carol does not notice her own suffering.

Instead she thinks of others. She even organizes a lending library! Her father keeps her well-supplied with books, and every other week, she chooses ten of them, creating personalized library cards for them and writing the titles down in a diary, and then her mother takes them to the Children's Hospital for the children there to read, picking up the ten books she left there last time.

She decides that she is going to do good for someone else every Christmas of her life and she is going to start with the Ruggles family that lives across the alleyway from hers in the old carriage house. She can sometimes see the nine Ruggles children playing in their yard from her window and she can hear them too. They are very poor;  Carol sends a formal invitation inviting them to the big house, then she plans a feast for them, and presents under the tree. Her only goal is to make their Christmas happy and memorable. Will she succeed or will she succumb to her illness?

If you like Burnett's A Little Princess and Andersen's The Little Match Girl, you'll like this one.

If you like the Victorian-inspired, “too good for this earth” trope which usually applies to children and other innocents, then this is the book for you. This is a style that was very popular for a number of years, a number of years ago, and as a glimpse into the past, it is interesting and well-written. It falls onto our modern ears as saccharine, though, and not very true-to-life. Carol's patience in the face of suffering, and her otherworldly goodness make her admirable, if not solidly rooted in reality.

And yet, in another sense, maybe Carol's spirit of charity and self-sacrifice shouldn't seem beyond the realm of possibility for us. Maybe the world would be a better place if her spirit lived on in “every chime of Christmas bells...and in every Christmas anthem sung by childish voices.”

CONTENT CONSIDERATIONS

 A small child dies; it is described as if Carol had “fallen asleep” and had “slipped away...into everlasting peace.”

Carol may seem a bit bossy on occasion, ie, when demanding that she be allowed to spend the money that her family would have spent on her Christmas presents, on the Ruggles children instead. But this is understandable under the circumstances.