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445
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2022
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Publié par
Date de parution
17 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9786177938636
Langue
English
Publié par
Date de parution
17 novembre 2022
Nombre de lectures
1
EAN13
9786177938636
Langue
English
50+ Masterpieces you have to read before you die
Christmas Stories and Poems
A Christmas Carol, A Merry Christmas, A Letter from Santa Claus, Christmas Bells, The Gift of the Magi and others
Anthology of Christmas Stories is a unique collection of Christmas tales, reflections, and poems from beloved authors across the centuries and makes the perfect gift for the reader in your life. This beautiful treasury will take you back to firesides, simple gifts, and warm family moments of Christmases past as you cherish the timeless truths and joys of the season.
Contents:
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
The Chimes
G.K. Chesterton
A Christmas Carol
L.M. Montgomery
The Red Room
A Christmas Mistake
A Christmas Inspiration
The Josephs’ Christmas
Aunt Cyrilla’s Christmas Basket
The Osbornes’ Christmas
Bertie’s New Year
Ida’s New Year Cake
The Christmas Surprise at Enderly Road
Clorinda’s Gifts
The Falsoms’ Christmas Dinner
The Unforgotten One
Christmas at Red Butte
Uncle Richard’s New Year’s Dinner
L. Frank Baum
A Kidnapped Santa Claus
Little Bun Rabbit
Mark Twain
A Letter from Santa Claus
Louisa May Alcott
A Merry Christmas
Leo Tolstoy
A Russian Christmas Party
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Christmas Bells
The Three Kings
Nikolai Gogol
Christmas Eve
William Dean Howells
Christmas Everyday
The Pony Engine and the Pacific Express
Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Christmas in India
Elizabeth Harrison
Little Gretchen and the Wooden Shoe
John Milton
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
Hans Christian Andersen
The Fir Tree
The Little Match Girl
Selma Lagerlof
The Holy Night
Clement Moore
The Night Before Christmas
Henry van Dyke
The Other Wise Man
Beatrix Potter
The Tailor of Gloucester
Anton Chehov
Vanka
O. Henry
The Gift of the Magi
Hesba Stretton
The Christmas Child
Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows
Robert Louis Stevenson
Christmas at Sea
Walter Scott
Christmas In The Olden Time
Alfred Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells
Abbie Farwell Brown
The Christmas Angel
Anthony Trollope
Christmas at Thompson Hall
Thomas Hardy
The Oxen
William Butler Yeats
The Magi
William Makepeace Thackeray
The Mahogany Tree
Charles Kingsley
Christmas Day
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Christmas Fancies
C. W. Stubbs
Twas Jolly, Jolly Wat
Eugene Field
Jest 'Fore Christmas
Paul Laurence Dunbar
A Christmas Folksong
William Topaz McGonagall
A Tale of Christmas Eve
Emily Dickinson
The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman
Table of Contents
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
The Chimes
G.K. Chesterton
A Christmas Carol
L.M. Montgomery
The Red Room
A Christmas Mistake
A Christmas Inspiration
The Josephs’ Christmas
Aunt Cyrilla’s Christmas Basket
The Osbornes’ Christmas
Bertie’s New Year
Ida’s New Year Cake
The Christmas Surprise at Enderly Road
Clorinda’s Gifts
The Falsoms’ Christmas Dinner
The Unforgotten One
Christmas at Red Butte
Uncle Richard’s New Year’s Dinner
L. Frank Baum
A Kidnapped Santa Claus
Little Bun Rabbit
Mark Twain
A Letter from Santa Claus
Louisa May Alcott
A Merry Christmas
Leo Tolstoy
A Russian Christmas Party
Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Christmas Bells
The Three Kings
Nikolai Gogol
Christmas Eve
William Dean Howells
Christmas Everyday
The Pony Engine and the Pacific Express
Joseph Rudyard Kipling
Christmas in India
Elizabeth Harrison
Little Gretchen and the Wooden Shoe
John Milton
On the Morning of Christ's Nativity
Hans Christian Andersen
The Fir Tree
The Little Match Girl
Selma Lagerlof
The Holy Night
Clement Moore
The Night Before Christmas
Henry van Dyke
The Other Wise Man
Beatrix Potter
The Tailor of Gloucester
Anton Chehov
Vanka
O. Henry
The Gift of the Magi
Hesba Stretton
The Christmas Child
Kenneth Grahame
The Wind in the Willows
Robert Louis Stevenson
Christmas at Sea
Walter Scott
Christmas In The Olden Time
Alfred Tennyson
Ring out, wild bells
Abbie Farwell Brown
The Christmas Angel
Anthony Trollope
Christmas at Thompson Hall
Thomas Hardy
The Oxen
William Butler Yeats
The Magi
William Makepeace Thackeray
The Mahogany Tree
Charles Kingsley
Christmas Day
Ella Wheeler Wilcox
Christmas Fancies
C. W. Stubbs
Twas Jolly, Jolly Wat
Eugene Field
Jest 'Fore Christmas
Paul Laurence Dunbar
A Christmas Folksong
William Topaz McGonagall
A Tale of Christmas Eve
Emily Dickinson
The Savior must have been a docile Gentleman
Charles Dickens
A Christmas Carol
Preface
I HAVE endeavoured in this Ghostly little book, to raise the Ghost of an Idea, which shall not put my readers out of humour with themselves, with each other, with the season, or with me. May it haunt their houses pleasantly, and no one wish to lay it.
Their faithful Friend and Servant,
C. D.
December , 1843.
Stave One. Marley’s Ghost
Marley was dead: to begin with. There is no doubt whatever about that. The register of his burial was signed by the clergyman, the clerk, the undertaker, and the chief mourner. Scrooge signed it: and Scrooge’s name was good upon ’Change, for anything he chose to put his hand to. Old Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Mind! I don’t mean to say that I know, of my own knowledge, what there is particularly dead about a door-nail. I might have been inclined, myself, to regard a coffin-nail as the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade. But the wisdom of our ancestors is in the simile; and my unhallowed hands shall not disturb it, or the Country’s done for. You will therefore permit me to repeat, emphatically, that Marley was as dead as a door-nail.
Scrooge knew he was dead? Of course he did. How could it be otherwise? Scrooge and he were partners for I don’t know how many years. Scrooge was his sole executor, his sole administrator, his sole assign, his sole residuary legatee, his sole friend, and sole mourner. And even Scrooge was not so dreadfully cut up by the sad event, but that he was an excellent man of business on the very day of the funeral, and solemnised it with an undoubted bargain.
The mention of Marley’s funeral brings me back to the point I started from. There is no doubt that Marley was dead. This must be distinctly understood, or nothing wonderful can come of the story I am going to relate. If we were not perfectly convinced that Hamlet’s Father died before the play began, there would be nothing more remarkable in his taking a stroll at night, in an easterly wind, upon his own ramparts, than there would be in any other middle-aged gentleman rashly turning out after dark in a breezy spot-say Saint Paul’s Churchyard for instance-literally to astonish his son’s weak mind.
Scrooge never painted out Old Marley’s name. There it stood, years afterwards, above the warehouse door: Scrooge and Marley. The firm was known as Scrooge and Marley. Sometimes people new to the business called Scrooge Scrooge, and sometimes Marley, but he answered to both names. It was all the same to him.
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted hand at the grindstone, Scrooge! a squeezing, wrenching, grasping, scraping, clutching, covetous, old sinner! Hard and sharp as flint, from which no steel had ever struck out generous fire; secret, and self-contained, and solitary as an oyster. The cold within him froze his old features, nipped his pointed nose, shrivelled his cheek, stiffened his gait; made his eyes red, his thin lips blue; and spoke out shrewdly in his grating voice. A frosty rime was on his head, and on his eyebrows, and his wiry chin. He carried his own low temperature always about with him; he iced his office in the dog-days; and didn’t thaw it one degree at Christmas.
External heat and cold had little influence on Scrooge. No warmth could warm, no wintry weather chill him. No wind that blew was bitterer than he, no falling snow was more intent upon its purpose, no pelting rain less open to entreaty. Foul weather didn’t know where to have him. The heaviest rain, and snow, and hail, and sleet, could boast of the advantage over him in only one respect. They often “came down” handsomely, and Scrooge never did.
Nobody ever stopped him in the street to say, with gladsome looks, “My dear Scrooge, how are you? When will you come to see me?” No beggars implored him to bestow a trifle, no children asked him what it was o’clock, no man or woman ever once in all his life inquired the way to such and such a place, of Scrooge. Even the blind men’s dogs appeared to know him; and when they saw him coming on, would tug their owners into doorways and up courts; and then would wag their tails as though they said, “No eye at all is better than an evil eye, dark master!”
But what did Scrooge care! It was the very thing he liked. To edge his way along the crowded paths of life, warning all human sympathy to keep its distance, was what the knowing ones call “nuts” to Scrooge.
Once upon a time-of all the good days in the year, on Christmas Eve-old Scrooge sat busy in his counting-house. It was cold, bleak, biting weather: foggy withal: and he could hear the people in the court outside, go wheezing up and down, beating their hands upon their breasts, and stamping their feet upon the pavement stones to warm them. The city clocks had only just gone three, but it was quite dark already-it had not been light all day-and candles were flaring in the windows of the neighbouring offices, like ruddy smears upon the palpable brown air. The fog came pouring in at every chink and keyhole, and was so dense without, that although the court was of the narrowest, the houses opposite were mere phantoms. To see the dingy cloud come drooping down, obscuring everything, one might have thought that Nature lived hard by, and was brewing on a large scale.
The door of Scrooge’s counting-house was open that he might keep his eye upon his clerk, who in a dismal little cel