O Christmas Three: O. Henry, Tolstoy, and Dickens

Heartwarming stories that recall Christmases past: · O.Henry’s all-American tale, The Gift of the Magi, originally published in 1906. · Leo Tolstoy’s Russian folktale, Where Love Is, There God Is Also from 1887. · And Charles Dickens’ little-known classics The Seven Poor Travellers and What Christmas Is As We Grow Older, from 1854 and 1851. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied. Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven cents. And the next day would be Christmas…. She had been saving every penny she could for months, with this result. Twenty dollars a week doesn’t go far. Expenses had been greater than she had calculated. They always are. Only .87 to buy a present for Jim. Her Jim.
– from the beginning of The Gift of the Magi