A Treasury of Christmas Stories Read Free

sparks from the bonfire.
    A lump crept to my throat.
    Before long, the night filled with “Hark! The Herald Angels Sing” and “It Came Upon a Midnight Clear.”
    My soul was shaken.
    In broken English, the director asked us to sing the last song with them.
    My voice quavered as I sang, my English words blending with their Swahili. “Silent night, holy night, all is calm, all is bright, round yon virgin mother and child …”
    Hot tears streamed down my cheeks. It was Christmas, a real Christmas, not one bound by cultures or traditions.
    In Africa, the wondrous story returned to touch me.
    Elaine L. Schulte is the author of thirty-six novels and hundreds of articles and short stories for both adults and children. She has lived in Europe and traveled extensively, but her “Swahili Christmas” turned out to be the best vacation of her life. She and her husband, Frank, have two sons and two grandchildren.

The Christmas Well
    By Janet Lynn Oakley
    W HEN THE CITY PIPES broke at four above zero, the water spread out across our road like the thick roots of a crystal banyan tree and froze. We all came out to stare, our boots slipping on the remains of last week’s snow. It was three days before Christmas. Our trees and lights were up, our cookies were in the canisters, and our stockings were on the mantel, but we had no water.
    â€œNot until the twenty-eighth,” the Forest Hills Water Department said and would have left it at that until someone got the brilliant idea of hauling up a water tank and putting it at the top of the hill.
    â€œAt least it’s something,” a neighbor said and went to organize her pots.
    Others weren’t so sure and said that the season was ruined.
    Our community well arrived that afternoon. An old World War II water tankard bristling with spigots, its camouflage shell looked odd against the neat prewar brick homes lined with hedges and crusted with old snow. Curious children and their parents watched a brief demonstration, and then were left to their imaginations as to how they would actually do it.
    I heard about the tankard after I came home from junior high school. Mom, Dad, and my brother, John, had already carried enough pots of water into the kitchen to make it look like a battlefield after a major roof leak. (There was a leak of some sort, a family member later recalled. A pipe had snapped from the cold.) We had water in stew pots, canning pots, saucepans, and even a few tin cans for the powder room. A large boiler was on the stove for doing dishes and washing hands.
    In the living room behind the swinging kitchen doors, Handel played on the radio. The windows were painted with angels and snow, and the Christmas tree was ready to trim. Christmas was not going to be delayed.
    Winters are cold and often snowy in Pittsburgh. Except for the hordes of children with whom I sledded in the open field below the alley, neighbors only glimpsed and waved at one another as they communally scraped ice or snow off windshields on the way to work or to shop. Snowman-worthy snow might bring out a few townspeople for a moment’s divertissement, but that was usually reserved for the younger crowd. Most folks kept to their calendar of baking, Christmas-card writing, and package sending-off. Visiting applied only to a few close friends and often it was by telephone to catch up on the day’s news. In winter we just stayed inside. The Christmas well changed that.
    From morning to night we bundled up in our bright wool coats and scarves and rubber overboots and trudged up the hill to the tankard with our pails and pots in hand, like ants making lines to a picnic. Neighbors that we hadn’t seen since summer or hardly knew at all tiptoed down their steep stairs or off their brick porches to go to the well. As we gathered at the spigots, conversations blossomed in the frigid air, puffing out like little smoke signals.
    â€œWhat’s news, Mrs. Hanna? Did you