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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The little match girl - I LOVED it.  An orphan survives by selling matches on the street corner. On Christmas Eve she’s very cold in a blizzard and sees a family in their home all warm and happy.  They welcome her in and she gets to enjoy this beautiful family scene. Except she didn’t really, that was a hallucination from hypothermia and she’s dead found dead on the street corner in the snow on Xmas morning.[/quote]

I remember this book! Geez looking at this list and thinking about books I read as a kid, it was bleak stuff! [/quote]

I remember this book too.  I was honestly terrified of it.[/quote]

It is so effing dark. But there is no accounting for taste.

Disney has an animation of it in a short film collection dvd we have and I was forwarding past it and my kids (8, 6 and 3) were like 'why mum' and I was like 'it's so depressing'. They were like 'at least tell us what it's about!' so I was like "long ago, life sucked, everyone was poor, this kid had no parents and had to work in the streets selling crappy matches no one wanted and everyone was mean to her and one night it was so bloody snowy and cold she started striking matches to stay warm. It was a hard decision because she really needed to sell the matches to make money to buy food to eat- if she used them all she'd have no food and no matches...she struck matches all night until an angel saved her and brought her to a splendid home where she had food, warmth, clean clothes and things she'd never had before. It was great. Except it didn't really happen- surprise, she actually froze to death in the alley and her brain made up the hallucination as she succumbed to hypothermia and froze to death! The end."

The 8 year old (B) nodded and said "that IS depressing. I'm fine not seeing it" and was fine to start the next movie.
The 6 year old (G) wanted to know if they showed her dead body.
The 3 year old (G) asked what 'succumbed' meant.

The girls wanted to watch it and did so cuddling together in their blankets, completely focused. They really processed it and asked a lot of questions about the world/kids in history/hypothermia and the boy watched it as he played with other things and said 'lets never watch it again'. I let them know there was a great world out there but it can also be a scary world and they understood. At the time I worked at Department of Labor and there is a huge dark depressing mural on the wall there that shows the history of labor, including children. The oldest mentioned "like in the painting in your building" and the others were like "Oh yeah!" so this moved into a conversation about socialism and government aid, welfare systems and protection for children, the elderly etc etc. They just couldn't believe there was a whole world out there where children were abused/treated like rats and left to freeze in the street historically, but also that it exists today). BUT: it's a good seasonal seque into doing charity work/donations for the needy.

I hope they aren't scarred for life. If you 'loved' this story/short movie, you'd also love "The Water Babies" book (warning- judgments about Catholics, Jews, Americans, Irish and the poor) and 1978 movie. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-ACpWUFttTI (street urchin/chimney sweep/oh wait it's a fantasy cartoon of escapism!)[/quote]

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