The Spirit of Christmas, as Found in Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Books

Christmas, in Little House on the Prairie, is an anxious time. Laura worries that Santa won’t be able to travel to the Kansas territory without snow – and all they’re getting is rain! Mary worries that, even with snow, Santa will be looking for them back in the big woods, and wouldn’t find them so far away.

Keep in mind that, in Little House in the Big Woods, the girls learned that children’s Christmas gifts came from Santa – not from family members; only adults gave each other gifts at Christmas. So, no Santa means no gifts. Not that the girls expect much in the way of gifts: in LHBW, they each received hand-made mittens and a peppermint stick. Although Laura received a rag doll, that was only because she was the littlest. Mary, who already had a rag doll, received nothing beyond the mittens and candy; and Carrie, who just an infant, received nothing because babies didn’t need presents.

Laura and Mary count down the days to Christmas on their fingers. On Christmas Eve, it rains and rains. In the afternoon, it finally clears up but, when the family opens the front door, they can hear the nearby creek – which stood between their cabin and civilization – running high, too high for Santa to ride across, they worry.

Pa shoots a turkey and tries to tempt Laura with the idea of a huge turkey drumstick but she’s too worried for teasing. Mary asks if the creek is going down and, when Pa says it’s still rising, Ma worries about the creek being too dangerous to cross, forcing their kind neighbor, Mr. Edwards, to spend Christmas by himself. The girls go to bed, certain that, if Mr. Edwards can’t make it, neither will Santa.

“Ma said it was too bad that Santa Claus couldn’t come this year, but they were such good girls that he hadn’t forgotten them; he would surely come next year.”

Holy cow! Can you imagine any red-blooded American kid putting up with that? The Ingalls girls are sad – “it did not seem like Christmas time.” As the girls drop off to sleep, they hear Ma and Pa talking by the fire. (Remember that, even here on the wide Kansas prairie, their cabin is one room, and the girls’ bed is right there in the same room as Ma and Pa, as they clean up after dinner and do light chores by the fire, like sewing or putting bread to proof, or cleaning traps and casting bullets.)

Pa doesn’t have the heart to even play the fiddle. Ma hangs up the stockings by the fireplace, hoping something will happen, and Pa chides her, telling that she’s just making it worse. But Laura thinks she hears Ma reply, “No, Charles, there’s the white sugar.”

And before Laura knows it, it’s morning and she hears Mr. Edwards calling Pa to let him in the door. But when she opens her eyes, she sees “the stockings limply dangling and she scrooged her shut eyes into the pillow.” Mr. Edwards tells Ma and Pa that he carried his clothes on his head and swam the creek. Pa piles wood on the fire to try to stop Mr. Edward’s shivering and Pa scolds him for taking a risk for a Christmas dinner. Edwards says nothing could stop him from bringing the girls’ gifts from Independence.

Laura and Mary sit up in bed and shout, demanding to know if Mr. Edwards met Santa Claus and where and when and what did he look like, and what Santa said, and what he gave Mr. Edwards for them. Ma tells them to look away while she puts the gifts in the stockings. Edwards sits down by their bed blocking their view of Ma and tells them that, when he saw the creek rising, he figured Santa wouldn’t be able to cross the creek (being too old and fat) and so wouldn’t bother coming any closer than Independence; so Mr. Edwards made the trip to Independence to fetch the gifts from Santa.

Edwards runs into Santa that rainy night, and recognizes – by the light from the saloons – Santa’s “longest, thickest, whitest set of whiskers west of the Mississippi” which Santa tucks under a bandana. Santa greets Edwards by name (“Santa knew everybody”, Edwards reassures the girls), and asks about Laura and Mary by name. When Santa hears that Edwards knows the girls, he fetches their gifts from his pack mule (when Laura asks about his reindeer, Mary smugly points out that there isn’t any snow) and hand them over to Edwards for delivery.

When Ma gives the girls permission to look, Laura and Mary rush to their stockings. Each girl receives a shiny, tin cup of their very own (they had been sharing until that point). After recovering from that delight, they return to the stockings and pull out two peppermint sticks. (Laura licks hers but Mary resists, already in the running for the following Christmas, apparently.) Beneath the candy, they each find a beautiful little heart-shaped cake. “Over their delicate brown tops was sprinkled white sugar. The sparkling grains lay like tiny drifts of snow. The cakes were too pretty to eat” and the girls just sit and gaze at them until Laura (of course), finally takes a little nibble and realizes that it was made of white flour and white sugar! Completely overwhelmed, the girls have to be prompted by Ma to check deep in the toes of their stockings where they each find a shiny new penny.

“They never even thought of such a thing as having a penny. Think of having a whole penny for your very own. Think of having a cup and a cake and a stick of candy and a penny.”

The girls don’t spend these pennies until deep into the next book, when they go to school and realize that they need to buy a pencil to use with their slate for school. Imagine, a young American child receives an impressive amount of money and doesn’t immediately spend it on candy and toys! The girls are so shocked by all this largesse that they can just stand and stare at it, overwhelmed, and then Laura notices that the grown-ups are all silently crying and she doesn’t understand why.

There is no mention of Carrie in this scene, and I am thinking that, since she was still pre-toddler, she continued to be considered too young for presents. Earlier in this book, Laura and Mary scavenge a handful of colored beads from a seasonal native American campsite nearby, and Ma strong-arms the girls into stringing the beautiful beads into a necklace for Carrie which, to Laura’s disgust, Ma then puts away because Carrie is too young to wear it – so clearly Carrie is too young to recognize Christmas.

And then Mr. Edwards hands Ma nine sweet potatoes to go with the Christmas turkey. For Christmas dinner, they dine on the potatoes, turkey, and salt-rising bread made with white flour. For dessert, there are dried blackberries and little cakes, made with brown sugar. After dinner, Laura and Mary each eat one of their peppermint sticks.

I want to say a little something about the little cakes that the girls receive as compared with the cakes that Ma serves for dessert. In these days, white sugar and white flour are considered luxury items. Even when they have guests, Ma does not serve white sugar with the coffee, she serves pale brown sugar; when there are no guests, they sweeten the coffee with molasses. Late in the book, when Pa’s furs bring in a little extra cash, he comes home with a tiny bag of white sugar and each of the girls are allowed a smidgen to taste – but it is saved for company. From the way it’s described, in the same breath as the new glass panes for the window (“Oh, Charles, you didn’t!”), you know Pa has gone out on a limb to spend like that. (And it is less than a year later that Pa discovers that he is illegally homesteading on a reservation, and leaves this land of milk and honey behind, along with the glass windows.)

In this story, the gifts are not the objects within the stockings, but the generosity of Mr. Edwards, who walked all the way to Independence and back (40 miles each way. If Edwards walked 4 mph – he has long legs so probably exceeds the current average – that means he walked 10 hours each way to get these gifts), and then risked his life crossing the roaring creek to give the Ingalls girls a Christmas. It’s again about giving yourself for others, not about receiving things. Mr. Edwards only reward was the gratitude of Ma and Pa, and the sight of the girls joy – a joy not of receiving a list of presents that they wanted. In the descriptive passages, as the girls remove each gift from their stockings, it is as if that one item would have more than enough, and they almost forget to look further.

The true joy for the girls almost seems to come from knowing that Santa had appreciated them, had recognized them by name, had wanted to reward them for their good behavior all year, although he could not make the journey personally.