We’re entering “Fill-up the Fridge” season. Everything from mandarin oranges and heavy cream to smoked ham and extra-special cheeses is wending its way into our iceboxes and onto our pantries. For those following an Advent fast, the return of these items builds extra excitement.
Today might be a good time to remind ourselves of an endearing story about a lonely child who had none of these things. No, it’s not Tiny Tim. He had a loving family and more-or-less sufficient food on the table to keep the family going, albeit with constant worry about meeting the next day’s needs. I’m speaking instead of that nameless little girl forced onto the snowy streets by fear of her father, should she not sell her matches and bring the few coins home to him.
The Little Match Girl, created in 1846 by Hans Christian Andersen (1805-1875), does not always make it to the list of “top ten” holiday stories for reasons that include our culture’s preference for one-dimensional characters and illogically rendered happy endings. There is nothing mindless or superficial about this tale. But it is timely: children across the world still find themselves in circumstances similar to its young heroine.
We can puff up in pride any way we want about how we, as a society, have “taken on” the mistreatment of children (poverty, abuse, bullying, the trafficking of children, forced child marriages), but so much of what we but brag about stays solely in rhetoric. Children not far at all from my house and yours suffer through similar dilemmas every day, right under our noses.
So all the more can we admire Andersen’s quintessential narration of such suffering. Its special application to the Christmas Season comes from the nature of the self-created relief she finds, despite knowing the consequences of using up her matches. She lights one after another, each of which bring a brief thrill and spark of warmth. Most importantly, each flame brings a glorious vision of Christmas’ bounty and joy.
Then, she lights the remaining matches all together, yielding a fuller blaze to thaw her hands and face. In that vision, she experiences celestial rescue as the loving spirit of her grandmother, the only person who ever cared for her, reaches out to her.
The girl’s body is found frozen on the street the next morning. Yet her face reflects the lovely thing that has happened. She is no longer cold or alone. She has been wrapped in the love of her grandmother and the glory of the angels.
Reading Andersen’s prose, of course, is the best way to experience the story. But you may enjoy two short, very early film renditions of The Little Match Girl, the first (3:16) from 1902, made by a significant British filmmaker James Williamson (1855-1933) and featuring extraordinary special effects for its time.
The second film from 1914 gives a fuller picture (9½ minutes) of the girl’s predicament, including the brutish behavior of her father. Presented in iconic “silent-film” format, the inter-titles are in Dutch. While not needed to understand the action, their words present an easy opportunity for the kids to translate from Dutch to English, either through an online translator, or, if you have one, a Dutch-English dictionary. And insofar as the special effects in this film, one innovation gave sepia tinting of the girl’s match-brief visions. Also, your kids are unlikely to forget the animated goose that levitates itself off the platter.
Additionally, your children (or you) might enjoy discussing how music was created for early films. In the 1902 clip, someone at some point has underlaid a rendition of Beethoven’s “Moonlight Sonata” which works rather well, I think. What, though, might be better?
With the second film, ask your children (or yourself) to speculate about the music for each short scene. Adults know, but children often do not, that “live” musicians played ongoing musical accompaniment for silent films. Sometimes these were improvised (by theater organists) and sometimes they came from written musical scores played by small ensembles or orchestras. Live music for the silent-film industry gave rise to film scores once the technology for sound films (“talkies”) was developed.
If The Little Match Girl has not entered your Christmas treasury, let it serve as a vehicle for reexamining Andersen as an author. Too often his stories are associated with saccharine, plasticky renditions in Disney films. In fact, Andersen’s literary eye and pen were hard-driven, much like those of his contemporary Charles Dickens. He and Dickens saw and responded to the same social realities. They both cast extraordinary characters, Andersen leaving us a heritage of tales peopled by human and fantastic creatures, while Dickens excelled in powerful, short scenes within novels driven by archetypal villains and heroes.
And with some of us here the US experiencing a quite a cold Christmas, this story may speak even more vividly to your family. No matter when or where, though, we are well served to remember the coatless little match girl, helpless and driven by resolve, who still dwells in our midst.
Thank you for these price-less movies about the plight of a dirt-poor little girl, who doubtlessly pulls at our heart strings. The inter-titles in the second movie are in Dutch, although the little city is clearly a Danish (or Anglo-Saxon British) city with wood-wattle-daub houses, non-existent in The Netherlands, which had at that time wooden houses (e.g., Zaandam) or stone houses (in the major cities). The title is “Het Lucifer Verkoopstertje” (dat “tje” at the end of “verkoopster” = female seller is the typical Dutch diminutive, similar to the Russian diminutive. Also, “lucifer” – “devil” is the Dutch word for “match”). In the first movie she sees her grandmother, but it is an angel who comes to scoop her soul up and takes it to Heaven, but in the second Dutch-titled sepia movie, she has a yearning vision of her mother, who takes her away, but no Heaven is implied.
My seven children now range in age from 22-36 years old, but I have kept our cherished picture book of The Little Match Girl, illustrated perfectly by Rachel Isadora, OOP, I think. I read it aloud every year on 12/31, then briefly explained the theological implications, always with a lump in my throat, choked-up by the beauty and hope expressed in the tale. I once was able to see it performed as a short ballet.