Description:
Louisa May Alcott's An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving is a warm classic holiday story from the author of Little Women, filled with family life, New England feeling, childhood responsibility, and Thanksgiving charm.
When the Bassett children are left to manage the household Thanksgiving dinner on their own, the day becomes a lively test of courage, competence, good humour, and family affection. Tilly, Prue, and the younger children must face the great practical business of pies, pudding, turkey, and table, discovering along the way that a true Thanksgiving depends less on perfection than on loyalty, effort, and love. Alcott's story is short, vivid, and immediately appealing, with the kind of domestic detail and moral warmth that made her one of the most enduring writers of classic American children's literature.
First published in Aunt Jo's Scrap-Bag, Volume 6, in 1882, An Old-Fashioned Thanksgiving remains one of Alcott's best-known holiday tales. It is especially well suited for Thanksgiving reading, family read-alouds, school libraries, children's collections, gift giving, and readers who enjoy classic nineteenth-century stories about home, work, food, family, and the education of character. For readers of Little Women, Little Men, An Old-Fashioned Girl, and other Louisa May Alcott classics, this compact holiday story offers an inviting seasonal companion to her larger body of fiction.
Brief description: Louisa May Alcott (1832-1888) was an American novelist, short-story writer, and poet whose fiction helped define nineteenth-century American children's literature. Born in Germantown, Pennsylvania, and raised in New England, Alcott grew up among Transcendentalist thinkers and reformers, including her father, educator Amos Bronson Alcott. Her literary reputation rests above all on Little Women, but her wider body of work includes Little Men, Jo's Boys, An Old-Fashioned Girl, Eight Cousins, Rose in Bloom, and many short stories for young readers. Alcott's fiction is known for its vivid domestic settings, intelligent girls and young women, moral seriousness, humour, and enduring interest in family, education, work, independence, and character. Her stories remain central to American classic fiction, juvenile literature, and holiday reading traditions.