Showing results for "Merry Christmas" in Classics

Enjoy this classic piece, which has also been recorded with a musical interpretation in the narrator's Ring Out Wild Bells collection.

Enchanting, tragic, and hilarious fairy tales for adults and children grace these pages. An initial glance might lead you to assume that these are satirical versions of classic Christmas ghost stories. However, beneath the humorous stories involving ghosts, repentant sinners, miracles, and good peasants who find well-deserved happiness, lies a psychological undercurrent that sharpens the sense of intrigue and plot movement. Often this is aided by the unrelenting social exposure of the authors who always understood how intangible the "bourgeois paradise" truly was.

The First World War has left the world in agony. Disillusionment, hopelessness, and horror are rife when a despondent author gets a visit by Father Time and Father Christmas, who come to raise his spirits. He wishes for better days, but the war has taken everything, turning him into a hopeless and angry nihilist. Nevertheless, the Christmas spirit is here to bring hope and another chance at happiness.

"A Merry Christmas" is the famous Christmas scene (Chapter Two) from the immortal Louisa May Alcott novel, Little Women. The four March sisters, Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy, and their mother, celebrate Christmas without their father who has gone to war. Newly impoverished, after father's financial loss, the sisters work outside the home for money to support the family, and rediscover the true meaning of Christmas in the process.

When 10-year-old Merry Maddock makes a holiday wish on a shooting star, she has no idea how her life will change. Suddenly, she's become the parent to a strange baby owl, and the caretaker of what appears to be an enchanted tree. But will her wish for a family Christmas be granted? Or will her mother's desire for a year without a holiday win out?