Louisa May Alcott is yet another of those hardy and hearty New England writers of the 19th century who never married or had children. When Louisa’s sister May passed away at an early age, however, Louisa took in her niece Lulu (named after her aunt) and raised for several years before Louisa, too, succumbed to illness. Two years before that unfortunately early end, Alcott gathered a group of short stories written specifically to entertain young readers (though mostly directed toward girls) into a collection titled Lulu’s Library. One of these stories collected in this volume is “The Christmas Dream and How It Came to Be True.”
Although not the collected stories are not unified by the theme of Christmas, in her Preface explaining the origin of the collection, Alcott explains the provenance of the book is intricately related to the holiday season: “Having nothing else to offer this year, I have collected these stories (which have been favorite `bed-time’ stories for her little niece) in one volume as a Christmas gift to my boys and girls.” Alcott is a writer often associated with Christmas to the point that the multiple film adaptations of her novel Little Women can always be counted on as showing up on television during the holiday season alongside other films that are more distinctly about Christmas.
Alcott’s deep literary connection to Christmas is demonstrated in the narrative of this particular story as it makes heavy reference to the ultimate Christmas story, Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In fact, the plot itself is something of a reworking of the redemptive plot of that ghost story masquerading as Christmas. Like Scrooge, Alcott’s young heroine learns the true meaning of Christmas after being dreaming of being visited by spirit of Christmas. Alcott, however, gives the familiar story a twist ending worthy of O. Henry or The Twilight Zone.
