Grace’s Christmas present was to be the most beautiful of all. They had all worked at it together in the warm room, for Grace was so little that she didn’t notice.

Ma had taken the swan’s skin from its careful wrappings, and cut from it a little hood. The skin was so delicate that Ma trusted no one else to handle that; she sewed every stitch of the hood herself. But she let Laura and Carrie piece out the lining, of scraps of blue silk from the scrap bag. After Ma sewed the swan’s-down hood to the lining, it would not tear.

Then Ma looked again in the scrap bag, and chose a large piece of soft blue woolen cloth, that had once been her best winter dress. Out of it she cut a little coat. Laura and Carrie sewed the seams and pressed them; Mary put the tiny stitches in the hem at the bottom. Then on the coat Ma sewed a collar of the soft swan’s-down, and put narrow swan’s-down cuffs on the sleeves.

The blue coat trimmed with the white swan’s-down, and the delicate swan’s-down hood with its lining as blue as Grace’s eyes, were beautiful.

“It’s like making doll’s clothes,” Laura said.

“Grace will be lovelier than any doll,” Mary declared.

“Oh, let’s put them on her now!” Carrie cried, dancing in her eagerness.

But Ma had said the coat and the hood must be laid away until Christmas, and they were. They were waiting now for tomorrow morning to come.

From Chapter 19: Christmas Eve, By The Shores of Silver Lake by Laura Ingalls Wilder

“The food administration now becomes a great machine of mercy destined to carry the American spirit into the homes and hearts of a great host of bewildered, confused human beings, hungry, discouraged, saddened, submerged by the wreckage resulting from the war. They have gone thru fire for us. The least we can do is help them to their feet, to see that they are fed and clothed. Don’t let your community backslide! Play the game thru! America hates a quitter!

These ringing words were spoken by Dr. Ray Lyman Wilbur, president of Stanford University.

As a nation we have made a great reputation, it now remains to live up to it. Just what is this American spirit that our overseas force of fighters and helpers have carried into Europe? It is a spirit of helpfulness and courage, of sympathy and sacrifice, of energy and of fair play.

We have sent our fighting men to the aid of the wronged and helpless and food and clothing to the starving and destitute. Never before in history have the people of a whole nation denied themselves food that they might feed the hungry of other nations.

I am sure that a great many persons felt a sort of flatness and staleness in life when the war ended. Altho they were glad and deeply thankful, there was an unpleasantness in going back to ordinary things, a letting down from the heights to which they had attained, a silence in place of the bugle call to duty, to which their spirits had become attuned.

But here is a chance to exercise still further those qualities which, in spite of all the horrors, have made of the war a glorious thing by showing how the good still rises triumphant over the bad in the heart of humanity.

The appeal of Dr. Wilbur comes most appropriately at this time for the American spirit as it has been displayed is really the spirit of Christmas or in other words the spirit of Christianity, a practicable example of loving and serving and giving.

It is a wonderful thing for us to have accepted as our own such national ideals, but we cannot hold them as a nation unless we accept them for our own as individuals. So the responsibility rests upon each of us to keep our country true to the course it has taken and up to the high standard it has reached.

“The American Spirit”  by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in The Missouri Ruralist, December 20, 1918

The topic that had been given me for my club lesson was music. Now the only instrument I can play is the phonograph and I venture to sing only in a crowd where I can drown my voice in the volume of sound. To be sure I have a little music in my feet, but that would not answer for a club paper, so it seemed rather hopeless, but never yet have I been “stumped.” I began to dig up just plain facts about music and seldom have I found anything so interesting.

The simple fact, of how music came to have written form, takes us away into the days of chivalry, in the 16th Century. To guide the choir boys in following the melody when singing masses, the monks wrote the Latin words, not in a straight line but up and down to indicate their place in the musical scale. Later, to shorten the time and labor of writing, the words were replaced by circles and horizontal lines of the staff were added to more clearly indicate their position. Slowly, from time to time, the different forms of notes were made and music was standardized into the base and treble cleffs, so that our music of today takes its printed form directly from the manuscripts so laboriously written by hand in the monasteries of the 16th Century.

This is only one of many things I learned about music, but I learned also that it isn’t what one already knows that adds interest to the preparation of a club paper so much as the learning something new in order to be able to go on with it.

Learning things is most fascinating and I think it adds joy to life to be continually learning things so that we may be able to go on with it creditably.

“As a Farm Woman Thinks” (29), by Laura Ingalls Wilder, published in The Missouri Ruralist, April 1, 1924