In Alta Halverson Seymour’s beautiful Christmas story, The Christmas Stove, 11-year-old Peter and 8-year-old Trudi lose their parents in an avalanche. The children make the difficult journey down the mountain to the village of Zimmerli, looking for their Tante Maria in the hopes that she will adopt them. The children arrive a few weeks before Christmas to find a kind-hearted but sickly woman who is quite poor. Together, the three of them share the struggle for existence and feast on the love they have for each other. A sweet and innocent story, this one reminds a little bit of Ralph Moody’s Mary Emma and Company.
Tante Maria, a seamstress by trade, has very little to share with her niece and nephew, but it is just exactly what everyone needs. Because of a long illness, her money has nearly run out, but her home is full of love and becomes a place of stability for hardworking and creative children.
Alta Halverson Seymour’s father was a grocer in Wisconsin when Alta was a young child. In this story, Tante Maria sends Peter to the small grocery store in search of some food and the possibility of some work. The young couple who own the store are generous and good; I suspect that Seymour patterned them after her own parents. The Elmers hire Peter to help with stocking the shelves in the mornings before school and pay him generously in food and necessities. They also hire Trudi to mind their baby so that Frau Elmer can help her husband with the customers.
In Tante Maria’s home, there is a beautiful porcelain stove that is covered in tiles that depict Christmas scenes. This stove becomes an important part of the story, and the corner of nearly every page of the book is embellished with pictures from the tiles.
As is appropriate in a Christmas story, there is a grumpy old woodworker (maybe a bit like “The Christmas Miracle of Jonathan Toomey”), a sharpish old busybody, and the young grocer and his wife living far away from friends and family. The storylines of each converge around the Christmas stove in just the right way.
Parents of Small Children: there is discussion of Santa Claus in this story. Trudi very much believes in Santa, but Peter and Tante Maria exchange looks and small comments about being afraid of Trudi being disappointed. If you were to do this as a read-aloud, you could modify it. At only 94 pages, you could quickly pre-read and get a sense of whether or not it would fit well with your family right now.