All the careful planning in the world, the nicest presents, wreaths in the windows, and candy canes in the doorways would not make Christmas Eve a happy time in any house unless the people in that house were happy. If Betsy's eyes were red, no forced gaiety would make the hearts of the others light.
"I couldn't be so mean," Betsy said fiercely. "Please, God, help me to take Julia's place, tonight."
And with that simple prayer, Betsy, like hundreds of millions of women before her, and countless others to follow, goes in the bathroom and fixes herself up. She washes the tears out of her eyes, uses cold water to bring a pink glow to her cheeks, and combs her hair, finishing with a festive sprig of holly. And then she dashes downstairs as though nothing in the world is wrong, and she gives her mother, father, little sister, and a dear family friend named Anna, a very merry Christmas Eve.
This simple act of self-sacrifice doesn't magically result in the return of her true love. The course of true love never did run smooth (thanks, Lysander), and Betsy still has a great deal of heartache ahead of her. But this Christmas, Betsy begins to emerge as a caring woman who discovers a precious thing about love: we can find great joy in putting thoughts of ourselves aside in order to tend to the happiness of others.
The same lesson is learned in the first pages of Little Women. It's Christmas, and Jo March and her sisters (Meg, Beth, and Amy), are feeling the effects of poverty and a father away at the battlefront. "Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," Jo famously grumbles. But they ward off their Christmas Eve blues by planning to spend what little money they have on their beloved Marmee. Refreshed by this plan, they cheerfully work together sewing sheets for a relative and customer until nine o'clock at night.
The next morning, they discover that Marmee has placed under each of their pillows a book containing "that beautiful old story of the best life ever lived." Intended as a guidebook to help them "do their duty faithfully, fight their bosom enemies bravely, and conquer themselves so beautifully," each girl resolves to read from this story every morning. They begin promptly. They are thus prepared when they run downstairs and their Marmee asks them to give their breakfast away as a Christmas present to a family of starving children.
They were all unusually hungry, having waited nearly an hour, and for a minute no one spoke -- only a minute, for Jo exclaimed impetuously, "I'm so glad you came before we began!"
"I thought you'd do it," said Mrs. March, smiling as if satisfied. "You shall all go and help me, and when we come back we will have bread and milk for breakfast, and make it up at dinnertime.
The March family packed up their breakfast and took it to the poor Hummels, six children, a mother, and a baby, starving in a single bare room, turning blue from the cold. They stopped up the holes in the windows, built a fire with the wood they brought, and the March sisters served their breakfast to the Hummel children while Marmee tended to the sick mother and baby.
The Marches still had a long winter ahead of them, and there is much tragedy to be endured in the pages of Little Women. Just as we saw with Betsy Ray, such acts of kind selflessness don't immediately pay off with a glowing cure for the aches and pains that plague our fragile feeling hearts. But they do pay off immediately in another way, in a moment of joy brought to others, and in the long term by creating compassionate and caring young women. As Alcott writes,
That was a very happy breakfast, though they didn't get any of it; and when they went away, leaving comfort behind, I think there were not in all the city four merrier people than the hungry little girls who gave away their breakfasts and contented themselves with bread and milk on Christmas morning.
While at times the striving for moral perfection found in much of the best American literature seems nearly suffocating (particularly in the hands of Alcott's Marmee), the palpably joyous returns from acts of self-sacrifice radiate from the pens of Alcott and Lovelace. Self-sacrifice is a wonderful antidote to the emptiness that often flows from self-indulgence, and perhaps self-discipline and self-sacrifice are not such bad propositions to put to today's youngsters, who will have to work out how to live in a world that can't survive the indulgences of their parents.
Beth Davies-Stofka teaches courses on comparative religion and the philosophy of religion. She has also been an online columnist and critic and contributes regularly to the Patheos site.
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