About Louisa May Alcott:

      Louisa May Alcott (November 29, 1832 – March 6, 1888) was an American novelist and poet best known as the author of the novel Little Women (1868) and its sequels Little Men (1871) and Jo's Boys (1886). Raised by her transcendentalist parents, Abigail May and Amos Bronson Alcott in New England, she also grew up among many of the well-known intellectuals of the day such as Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Henry David Thoreau and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.

      Alcott's family suffered from financial difficulties, and while she worked to help support the family from an early age, she also sought an outlet in writing. She began to receive critical success for her writing in the 1860s. Early in her career, she sometimes used the pen name A. M. Barnard, under which she wrote novels for young adults that focused on spies, revenge, and cross dressers.

      Published in 1868, Little Women is set in the Alcott family home, Orchard House, in Concord, Massachusetts and is loosely based on Alcott's childhood experiences with her three sisters. The novel was very well received and is still a popular children's novel today, filmed several times.

      Alcott was an abolitionist and a feminist and remained unmarried throughout her life. She died from a stroke, two days after her father died, in Boston on March 6, 1888.

      Source: Wikipedia

      A New Way to Spend Christmas

      Adapted by Stephen W. Hines

      "In spite of rain and fog, our party met at the appointed hour on board of the boat bound for Randalls Island.

      This is one of the three islands that lie in East River that are used for charitable purposes. Blackwells Island is full of hospitals, alms and workhouses; Wards has a hospital for immigrants, a mental asylum, and the Potter's Field; but Randalls is devoted to children.

      On it is a nursery in which children over two years old are placed and kept until parents or guardians are able to provide for them. If not claimed, they are bound out at a proper age to respectable citizens to learn some useful trade. There are now in the nursery six hundred and forty-two boys and three hundred and twenty-one girls. A school for retarded children is also on this island as is a hospital for sick babies.

      For thirty years has the lady who led our party (a worthy daughter of good Isaac T. Hopper) visited the poor children in their various refuges, taking upon herself the duty of seeing that this holiday is not forgotten but kept as it should be, with goodies, gifts, kind words, and a motherly face to make sunshine in a shady place.