Victorian Christmas: A True Story Growing Up Poor, Rich in the Christmas Spirit

A Victorian Christmas Story

From The Ladies Home Journal, December 1901, Author Unknown

Once, long ago when I was a little girl, I was with my father in the mines of Colorado. Six months of the year we were snowed in. There was no getting any distance from the camp except on snowshoes. Christmas came, and with my heart all in a flutter I went to bed wondering what Santa Claus would put into my stocking.

"He will surely come, won't he, father?" I asked.

"Oh yes, he will come, but I doubt if he can carry much. We can't get out, but I think his reindeers will manage to get in."

"But how can he get the doll down the chimney if the fire is going?"

I had been longing for a doll with eyes and nose-not a wooden doll cut out of a pine stick like the only one I possessed. I grew so distressed over the fire that my father agreed to take out a window pane, assuring me that Santa Claus could get through very small places. However, I could not sleep for fear he would try the chimney, and not knowing about the window would grow discouraged and go away. So one of the miners got a great plank and wrote on it in charcoal in big letters "Go Through the Window," and put it on top of the shanty. Then after being told again and again that Santa Claus could read all languages I went to sleep.

Next morning I fairly fell out of bed and actually rolled toward my stocking in my intense anxiety to see if there were anything in it. Yes, there was the doll. Such a beauty! Holding it up to the light of the window I saw the eyes and nose and red cheeks; then, and no one knows why, I burst into tears and fairly bellowed, dancing about the room, crazy fashion, until I ran into my father's arms. There were sixteen miners witness to my joy, and not a dry eye was there in the room when I had finished my capers. The doll was made entirely out of white potatoes. One of the miners who knew something about carving concocted the plan, and with some wire and sticks and ink and paint, and the help of others who could sew and make clothes out of flour sacks and salt bags, this Christmas dolly grew into a great beauty.

"It pays a million times over," said one old-timer as he patted me on the head and remarked that he was glad Santa Claus came my way.

I did not understand until long afterward that there was a scarcity of provisions in camp, and the snowstorms were increasing. Or that father had forbidden the cutting up of the potatoes to make me a plaything. But the men held a council on the question, and father was overruled.

Potatoes at that time were two hundred dollars a sack.