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Hello and welcome to the Storytime for Grown Ups Christmas Spectacular. I'm Faith Moore and for the months of November and December, we'll be reading A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Each episode I'll read one chapter from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations so it's easier to follow along. It's like an audiobook with built in notes. So gather your family together, brew a pot of tea or a mug of hot chocolate, find a cozy chair and settle in. It's story time. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. Welcome to the conclusion episode of our Victorian Craft Christmas Spectacular. I hope that you enjoyed the final chapters of A Little Princess. I loved sharing them with you. And today we're going to kind of tile this up with a lovely Christmas bow. We're going to chat together for a while and then we're going to move forward into a little break and then David Copperfield. So I'm so thrilled to be with you here. Now, I want to just start by saying thank you. Thank you so much to everyone who has been a part of this Christmas Spectacular. Thank you to the kids, thank you to the adults. Thank you for everyone who participated in the various activities that we did. Thank you for everyone who bought my book this Christmas season. Thank you for writing in with your questions and your comments. This has been such a wonderful, joyful experience to do this with you. I have really felt that we have all kind of connected in new ways and this community has really grown and kind of knit itself together in a really lovely or really exciting way. So that's the first thing I want to say is thank you. Thank you for being a part of our Victorian Christmas Spectacular. It's been such a joy. So today we're going to talk about the end of the book and we're going to talk about some themes and bigger ideas that have been kind of running through the entire book all along. And I'm going to try to tie all those together and send you off into the Christmas season. But before I do that, I have a couple of housekeeping details. The first is that I would like to announce the winner of our final prize drawing. So all along we've had these prize drawings, we have had lots of fun. We had the Houseguest membership prize, we had the Storytime for Grown Ups mug. We have the Land Gentry membership prize. All of those are over in our drawing room, which is our online community. But now the final prize was your choice of either a signed copy of my book Christmas Carol, which I would mail to you, or or your money back on the copy that you bought. On one copy that you bought. And you can get in touch with me and let me know if you're the winner. So the winner of the grand prize, the final prize drawing for our Victorian Christmas Spectacular 2025, is Danielle Costa. So if you are Danielle Costa, please get in touch with me by going to my website, faith k.moore.com and click on Contact. Or you can scroll into the show notes and find the contact link there and get in touch with me, know that you are Danielle Costa, that you heard your name announced on the show and let me know which of the two choices you would like. Would you like the signed book or would you like your money back? So get in touch with me and congratulations to Danielle Costa and thank you so much to everyone who bought a copy of my book and then entered these drawings. I wish I could give things away to every single one of you and actually I can. If you would like a signed book plate, that is something that I can give away to, to all of you and I am still doing that. This is the end though. So after Christmas, essentially I will not be offering signed book plates for a little while. But if you would like one between now and Christmas, then please do get in touch with me. But otherwise, I just wanted to say thank you. Thank you for buying my book. I have been so blown away by how many people have done that and I really hope that you enjoy the book. I hope you read it. I hope you get in touch with me and let me know. Some of you already have and I really appreciate that. But I hope that you'll let me know how you like it and maybe even leave a review of it wherever you bought it, like on Amazon or Barnes and Noble or something like that. But just thank you. Thank you for buying the book and thank you for being a part of this Christmas season with me. Another housekeeping item is just to kind of remind you of what will happen next because this is where we end this book. And for some of you, I know this is the first book that you've listened to with us, so you might be wondering how exactly it works. How do we wrap this up? What do we do next? How do we move into the next book? Etc. So just a quick announcement about that. So this episode will conclude our Christmas spectacular. It will finish up A Little Princess and then we'll take a quick break. The break will be for Christmas and New Year's. I'm going to go spend that with my family. I hope that you will Be spending it with those that you love as well. And so the break will be about two weeks, and we will come back on January 5th. That's a Monday. And that will be our introduction episode to David Copperfield. So just like we did with this book, we do it with every book. We'll do an episode where we haven't started the book yet, but I'll give you some kind of introductory information. Usually it is some information about the author, some historical context that might be helpful, some things that you might need to know going in or that would make it easier for you to know going in. And that will be on the 5th. And then we will begin the book on January 8th. I will talk more in that intro episode about kind of how long this book will take us to read. It's a really long book, much longer than any of the books that we've read before. So I will kind of explain how that's going to work. I have planned it all out. I've planned for it. So don't worry, we're going to be fine. But I just will give you some logistical details during that intro episode as well. So the Intro's on the 5th and the book begins on the 8th, and I will talk to you about how long it will take and all of that in that episode. So that's what's coming next. And so the only other reminders before we really get into this episode are just make sure you're subscribed. That way, those initial David Copperfield episodes will just drop. So if you kind of forgot, like, if the two weeks go by and you didn't go looking for the episode, they'll show up in your podcast player. So make sure you're subscribed. This is a great time. If you haven't already tapped those five stars or left a positive review. We just finished a book, right? So this is a really good time to do that, if you haven't already. And it's a great, great time to tell any friends or colleagues or family members or just people that you meet on the street or strike up a conversation with, tell them about this show, let them know that this new book is starting, they can hit subscribe so that they get the episodes when they drop and just spread the word about the show. I would love to have even more of us listening when we come back in January. And if you tell someone, then you know someone in real life who listens to the show and you will have that person to be able to talk to about these books. And that's really, really fun. So that's another reason to do that. So, and then other than that, just scroll into the show notes because all those links are still there. That might be of interest to you. We've got the merch store. You can pick up some merch. We've got the Buy me a coffee page, although I always say it's Buy me a Tea, that's where you can sign up to be a member. If you'd like to join our online community, which is called the Drawing Room, you can sign up there. Also, there is just a kind of tip jar. The Buy me a coffee page can also just be a tip jar. If you'd like to make a financial donation to support the work that I'm doing here, I would love that. So thank you. Of course, there's no obligation, but if you are in the giving spirit and you would like to give a little donation, I would very much appreciate that. So the link to that is there as well. Okay, so we're going to get into this episode. The Victorian Christmas sing along will happen in this episode, but it's going to happen at the very end. So listen along and before I say goodbye to you, you will hear the Victorian Christmas sing along. I'm really, really excited about it. I hope you'll stick around to the end and listen. And thank you to all of those of you who participated in that and submitted your voices to this sing along. I hope you enjoy hearing that at the end. But first, let's actually just do a recap. We read last time, chapters 18 and 19. So let's talk about what happened in those chapters, how we ended the book, and then I will start to talk to you about the end of this book. So here is the recap. Okay, so where we left off, Mr. Carisford and Mr. Carmichael explain everything to Sara and she meets the children of the large family, and everyone is overjoyed to meet her and take her into their lives. Ms. Minchin shows up saying that Sara must come back immediately, and Mr. Carrisford tells her she's never coming back and that she's going to live with him from now on. Ms. Minchin tries to get Sara to say that she was well treated at the school, but Sara won't do it. When Ms. Minchin gets back, Ms. Amelia suddenly tells her off and says she knew they were doing wrong by Sara and then falls into a fit of hysterics. Ermengarde gets a letter from Sara explaining everything and the schoolroom is in an uproar. Becky Creeps upstairs thinking that she's forgotten, but finds Ram Dass up there with a letter from Sara saying that Becky should come to her the next day and be her attendant from then on. So Sara now lives with Mr. Carrisford, who she calls Uncle Tom, and he's like a second father to her. She often visits with Ermengarde and Lottie and the large family, and Becky is her attendant. And at the very end, Sara returns to the bakery where she gave the buns to the Becker girl and discovers that for her sake, the baker has taken in the beggar girl, and she is now clean and fed, and her name is Anne. Sarah arranges that the baker and Anne will always give food to the hungry and that she will pay for it. And then she and Mr. Carrisford ride off together in their carriage. And that was the end. Okay, so what I'm going to do is kind of sprinkle some of your comments and questions throughout this episode and use them as jumping off points as I try to make my case for why this book is a Christmas book. That's what I want to talk about in this episode. I had originally thought that I would talk about this a lot earlier on. I thought that when we got to the part where we realized that Sara is Cinderella, right, that this isn't just a little school story about little girls making friends, that it was actually Cinderella and there was at stake, I thought that at that point I was going to start to talk about why I'd chosen this book for Christmas. But I realized as we went along that actually the thing I wanted to say about this, it only really made sense once the whole story was over. I mean, there are places in the book that you could point at and say, well, that's very Christmassy, right? One of them is the scene with Donald giving Sara the sixpence on the street. I mean, that actually happens at Christmas time. And we get the images of the warm kind of lit up windows and Sara looking in. And of course, giving things away is a very Christmas sentiment. So we could point to that part. Several of you wrote in to say that the scene where Sara and Becky discover all the wonderful things that Ram Dass has brought to Sara, that that felt like Christmas morning. And I agree, it does. So that could be another moment to point to and say, yes, this is a Christmas book, here is why. And there's more like that. But I want to take a kind of wider view and that's why I waited until the end. But I do first want to talk about the end, because I think it'll tie into what I have to say and also because the book is over and we should talk about the ending. So to do that, I would like to read you a couple of your comments. This first one comes from Paula Fernandez. Paula writes, wow, what an amazing ending to a novel that I had never read before. I actually teared up at the end with the revelation of what happened to the beggar girl. This story brought a much needed reminder of how kindness in the midst of great adversity can transform people we come in contact with. Okay, and this other one is from Elizabeth. Elizabeth says, I went through several tissues listening to those last two chapters. The tears started right at the beginning when they sent for the mother of the large family to explain everything to Sara. I suddenly realized that it had been two years and Sara hadn't been hugged or kissed or loved in all that time. And then here was this mother coming to make everything okay. I'm tearing up now just writing this. Okay, so I am with you, Elizabeth. I listen to every episode before I put it out just to check for errors or glitches or whatever. And I was crying at that part for exactly that reason. Even though I've read this book like a million times. I love that in this moment when Sara is finally found and finally going to be rescued from this horrible life that she's been living for two years, everyone who cares about her is like, quick, send for a mother. This child needs a mom. Do we have any moms around here? And off they go to find a mother and the mother of the large family like any good mother would in this situation. I think she performs her motherly role to perfection, we are told. Here is a quote. Mrs. Carmichael was crying as she kissed her again. She felt as if she ought to be kissed very often because she had not been kissed for so long. Okay, so this rescue that happens in chapter 18, it begins with a mother being motherly, and it progresses very quickly to a father figure, Mr. Carrisford being fatherly. And there are other children around all the many children of the large family. And really what is it that this rescue consists of? Well, it's love, it's connection, it's human fellowship, and it's family. Right. Sarah is going to be adopted by Mr. Carrisford, which essentially completes the Cinderella transformation, because she began as a wealthy, doted on little girl with only a father, and now she is ending as a wealthy, doted on little girl with an adopted F. That's what happens at the end of Cinderella, she returns to her original state, right? Remember, Cinderella doesn't start as a drudge in Rag. She starts as a gentleman's daughter in most of the versions that we have. And she is then brought low, and then she is raised back up again and raised to even greater heights, because instead of being a gentleman's daughter in the fairy tales, she becomes a princess. And that is happening here, too. In a sense, she is richer than she ever was before, and everyone around her acknowledges now her princessness. Last time we talked about whether there was going to be a prince in this story, and I said that there wasn't going to be a prince in the sense of someone that Sara falls in love with and then marries. But I think it's fair to say that Mr. Carrisford is the prince of this story, because he is the one who is going to love her, become a family with her, and elevate her to this new station of princess on the inside and the outside. And just like the prince does in the story, Mr. Carrisford cared for Sara even when she was in rags. He didn't know it was Sara, but he saw the humanity of the little girl in the attic, and he wanted to help her, and he came to love her. Just like when the prince shows up with the slipper and he realizes that the girl from the ball is actually a servant girl, he doesn't run off in disgust. He puts that slipper on her foot and takes her to the altar to turn her into a literal princess to match the fairy tale princess that she has always been. So Mr. Carrisford is performing that role here, even though he's a father figure rather than a romantic figure, which is fine, I think, in this context, because Sara is far too young to be getting married, so this is another way for her to join together with someone as a family. So the end of the story really beautifully completes the arc of the Cinderella story by causing Sara to become a princess, essentially on the outside to match the princess that she's always been on the inside, and by performing that transformation through love. Love is the magical force here, as it is in many fairy tales, and I would argue, as it is in real life, too, because like Paula points out in her letter, this book has been all about love, really. It's been all about the ways in which Sara's kindness to others and her sort of selfless ability to think of others, even when she was cold and starving and unloved. And all of this, it's about how all of that changed the world around her and how it caused the people around her to love her. Even people like Mr. Carrisford and the members of the large family who didn't even know her. It caused them to love her in return and change her life because of it. And part of the magic that Sara carries with her is to create kindness wherever she goes, simply by being kind. But not just kind. I mean, it was kind to give Becky the cake when she first met her, right? But it was heroic, I think, to give those buns to the beggar girl when she wanted them for herself. It's the same impulse, but played out in a very different circumstance. And that's the whole thing about Sara. She is entirely who she is, no matter what. So if she would give food to a hungry scullery maid when she has lots of food, it's still right to give food to a hungry beggar girl, even when she only has a little food to give. And that act of, let's call it like heroic kindness. So this act of heroic kindness, we learn in the final chapter, that it spread without Sara even knowing it. Kind of like a sort of magic that she left behind. It spread to the baker woman who brought the beggar girl into the shop and has given her a job and tries to give food to the hungry when she can. Sara did that by her courage and her generosity and her selflessness. It wouldn't have happened otherwise. And now Sara comes back and she sprinkles her fairy tale magic onto the situation and makes it so that the baker woman can give away bread to anyone who's hungry whenever she sees them, because Sara will pay for the bread and the woman won't lose her income. Similarly, Sara pulls Becky up out of her life of poverty and loneliness, first by seeing her as a person deserving of care and love. Right. Remember, very early on, Sara tells Becky that she loves her. It's love that causes Sara to do what she does. So she sees her humanity right away. And then in her hardship, she shares what she can with Becky and continues to offer her that love and the escape that her pretends can bring. And then at the end, she rescues Becky as well. She performs her magic on Becky and pulls her out of the life that she thought she was destined to hold forever and into this new life of love. And Ms. Minchin, our wicked stepmother, she comes up against the cold, hard truth, which is that she has done the exact opposite of what Sara did, and she's going to pay for it. Right? She gets her comeuppance. Sara remained herself and Stuck to her values no matter what happened to her. She was kind and loyal and true when she had money, and she was kind and loyal and true when she didn't. But Ms. Minchin treated Sara with respect and attention when she had money. But she tortured her and punished her when she had none. And that means that when it turns out that Sara does have money after all, she wants nothing to do with Ms. Minchin. And the thing that Ms. Minchin cares about most, right, which is wealth and status and looking good and everything, that thing is completely out of her reach simply because she couldn't be kind to a little girl who had lost everything. So in one sense, this book is a Christmas book because it's about love. It's about giving. It's about giving even when you have almost nothing to give. It's about connecting with the people around you, about finding joy in the smallest things. And in the end, the reward for all of Sara's hardships and her courage through all the things that brought her down, her reward is family. It's not the money. It's not the diamond mines. It's the family that she gets to join and the love that she feels and the love that she gets to give. Here's how Sara feels about Mr. Carrisford. This is a quote. It says he was weak and broken with long illness and trouble, but he looked at her with the look she remembered in her father's eyes. That look of loving her and wanting to take her in his arms. It made her kneel down by him just as she used to kneel by her father when they were the dearest friends and lovers in the world. Okay, and Here is how Mr. Carisford feels about Sarah. Here's another. There never were such friends as these two became. Somehow they seemed to suit each other in a wonderful way. The Indian gentleman had never had a companion he liked quite as much as he liked Sara. Okay, so just like in A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens, if you listen to that with us or if you've read it on your own, just like in A Christmas Carol, the thing that matters most, the thing that changes the world, is not the material stuff, not the money or the fancy clothes or whatever, it's love. It's fellow feeling. It's community and connection and the joy that comes from knowing that you love and are loved. And that's what Christmas is all about, right? So in that sense, this is a Christmas book. But there's more to it. Okay, I want to read you another comment. And this one is from Joaquin. Joaquin says, I think there's a reason why Sara's make believe game acts as a force of nature. The decision distinction between a literal princess and a fairy tale princess is exactly the same as the distinction between what royalty is like in the kingdoms of men and what royalty is like in the kingdom of heaven. Okay. Cinderella is the story of a highborn person who is brought low, befriends the lowest of the low, stays completely and utterly true to herself even in the utmost adversity, is selfless and loving, is trampled and put upon and rejected by nearly everyone around her, hits rock bottom, and then is spectacularly and supernaturally restored to her rightful place and recognized for who she truly is and has been all along. Here is what I want to put forward. In a sense, the Cinderella story is very much like the Jesus story. And to me, that's what makes this book a Christmas book. Christmas, whether you're a believing Christian or not. The point here is not to preach or anything like that. I'm just talking about things that I think we can all agree on. One of them being that Christmas is the celebration of the birth of Jesus. For those who believe, it's the celebration of the moment when God so loved the world that he became one of us. He became incarnate, meaning he took on flesh, he took on human form, was born the way we all are born right from a mother's womb. And he came into the world so poor, so lowly, that his mother Mary gave birth to him in a stable and laid him in a manger, which is the thing where you put the food for the animals, right? A God, the highest being there is, became human and was born in a stable. Talk about a person who is high born being brought low. Okay, again, believe it as truth. Here it is a story, whatever you want, but that's the Christmas story. God becomes man out of love. And some people around him can see that he's God, right? The shepherds, the wise men, eventually his disciples and followers. And some people around him can't see it. He grows up, he lives his life. He teaches love and integrity and selflessness. He embodies those things and inspires them in others. He wields the supernatural power of his true form. And by supernatural, I just mean above nature, beyond the comprehension of the natural world. Not like weird ghosts or something like that, right? He affects the world in ways that only God could, even though he is still a man. And in the end, they kill him for it. But, and I know that we've moved past the actual Christmas story now, but it's relevant to the Cinderella narrative, so bear with me. So after hitting rock bottom, death on a cross is about as rock bottom as it gets. So after hitting rock bottom, he is gloriously restored to his true form. And he can be seen, seen by those who loved him. Changed and radiant. Okay, that's the life that Christmas begins. And that's the story of Cinderella too, in a lot of ways. Obviously, it's not identical. Obviously Cinderella is not Jesus. Don't send me emails saying that I said that Cinderella is Christ or something. I didn't. But the story arc is the same and the message of love, because remember, we're told that God is love, right? So the message of love made manifest in the world in human form, form is the story of Christmas and it's the story of Cinderella. Love was the magic that made Sara's fairy tale come true. And Joaquin's point about literal princesses and fairy tale princesses being like the kingdom of men and the kingdom of heaven is really apt here. All along we've been talking about the way in which the book was playing with the literal and the pretend, right? Sara's pretends had literal ramifications. Sara was pretending to be a princess, but she really was a princess on the inside. There was the literal wealth that she had and lost and regained, but the fairy tale princess ness was underneath that. Always the literal was wrapped up all along in the make believe, the magic and the make believe worked its magic on the literal world. Christmas is the story of spirit and flesh. It's the story of the supernatural, the spiritual, the heavenly, taking on literal and material form. It's about God made flesh, right? It's about God coming into the world via a mother, allowing himself to enter a family as a little baby and loving and being loved, Sara's pretends were a way of believing in something beyond herself. Some force that she couldn't see and didn't even really understand that could work in the world if she just believed in it hard enough. And she did believe. Her belief wavered sometimes, but it never failed her. She believed in the magic of her pretends, the magic of kindness, the magic of love. She believed. And because she believed, she made it true. Christmas is when the God of love enters the world and changes it forever. This book is about how one little girl who never stopped believing, never stopped doing what she knew was right, never stopped loving, created a kind of magic that changed the world around her. And whether you believe in the Christmas story as fact or whether you Hear it as a story. I think we can all agree that love is the most powerful magic there is. That's what Christmas is about. That's what this book is about. And that's why this book is a Christmas story. But I want to read you one more comment because it relates to what I was just talking about, about Cinderella and the Christmas story and all of this. But it'll make it a little bit broader, I think, a little more universal. And hopefully it will give you something to take with you through the Christmas season, but also into the new year and beyond. So I want to read you this last comment. It's from Mariam, and Mariam is 17 years old. Here's what she says. I was thinking about what you were saying about how Sara's pretending is kind of like a superpower, how her imagination actually leads to her having real impacts on other people's lives, like taking on the role of lot mom or spreading largesse to Becky. It's kind of like how we are reading books. And even though they are only real in our imaginations, I believe reading books like this and pretending that we really are with Sara and her friends and going through her story with her has real effects on our lives, too, and on everyone we interact with after that. Okay, so I just found this so beautiful and so true. And it's the perfect description of why I think that reading classic books will change the world. I've been saying that a lot lately because I think we're in a moment right now where people are starting to realize that even as technology advances to new heights, we can't let go of the wisdom and the experience of the past. And I think that books, great books, change our lives in exactly the way that Mariam is describing in her letter, which, as she points out, is exactly the way that SARS pretends changed the lives of the people around her and her own life, as well as our ability to read. These books live in the worlds that they create for us, meet the characters they present us with, feel for those characters, root for them, yearn for them, fall in love with them. Whatever it is our ability to do that changes us. We learn who we want to be and who we don't want to be. We learn what's brave and what's cowardly. We learn what integrity looks like and how to achieve it. We learn that we can feel deeply and meaningfully and beautifully. We learn we can fall in love. We learn what sort of person we want to fall in love with, what sort of person we want to be when someone falls in love with us. The magic that Sara brought into the world wasn't magic the way we think of it now. It was simply her ability to see a world beyond the one she was living in. And that's what books do for us. They allow us to enter worlds we'd never be able to access in real life and meet and interact with people we'd never know otherwise. And that in turn has real ramifications as the things we learn in books and the feelings we find we can feel shape us and give us the tools we need to be the people we were always meant to be. The magic in this book turned out to be love. The thing that Sara needed most, that everyone in the book needed most was love, connection, fellow feeling, the human community. And it was love that changed the world for the better. We got to live in that world for a while together. But love is magic in this world too. And this book taught us how to perform that magic. And we can take that lesson out into the world and make it real if we choose to. Love doesn't cost anything. You can give it right now and you can accept it right now. I'm not saying it's easy. It can sometimes be really, really hard. But you can do it. And I think that's something that we learned from this book. Book. It's certainly something we learned from the Christmas story. So just like Sara, you have magic. You have the magic to change someone's life. You have the magic to change your own life and to be the sort of person that you want to become. Books will help you read as many as you can. Keep listening here and I will help you read more. Kids, thank you for joining us for this Christmas spectacular. It's been an absolute joy to have you here grown ups. And thank you for being here too. You have been a joy as well. I hope that you have a wonderful Christmas and a very happy new year. I hope that you will be able to spend time with people who love you and people you love in return. But if that's not in the cards for you this Christmas time, please know that I am holding you in my heart. That you belong to this community and that whatever your circumstances or your situation, my hope for you this Christmas and every Christmas and always is that you can reorient your life to love. Even in the hardest times and the darkest days. Choose love. Choose joy. Merry Christmas. Happy New Year. I can't wait to be back with you on January 5th to begin. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. Thank you for being a part of our Victorian Christmas. It has been an absolute joy. And now I will send you off into your holiday with our Victorian Christmas. Sing along. Merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas we wish you a merry Christmas and a happy New Year this concludes our reading of A Little Princess by Frances Hodgson Burnett. Thank you for being a part of the Victorian Christmas Spectacular here on Storytime for Grown Up. Join us on Monday, January 5th, as we begin. David Copperfield by Charles Dickens. All right, everyone, story time is over. The end.