Under The Christmas Tree: Angela and the Baby Jesus by Frank McCourt

Frank McCourt, Pulitzer prize winner for his memoir Angela's Ashes has turned a bit of his family's oral history into a short Christmas story for children and grownups.

Angela and the Baby Jesus: (Children's Edition) is the story of McCourt's mother, the Christmas she is six years old. "When my mother Angela was six years old, she felt sorry for the Baby Jesus in the Christmas crib at St. Joseph's Church near School House Lane in Limerick," McCourt begins.

It is cold in the church, and baby Jesus lies in his tiny bed wearing nothing but a cloth across his middle, his little arms lifted as if appealing to Mother Mary to pick him up and hold him inside her warm blue robes. Angela longs to warm the Child, and hiding inside the confessional until all the old ladies shuffle out at dusk, Angela creeps out and nicks the Baby Jesus, smuggling him under her sweater and running down the alley to the back wall behind her own house.

There Angela realizes she has a problem. She knows she can climb over the wall, but not carrying the Baby Jesus with her. After one failed try to toss the figure over the wall, she succeeds, only to be caught in the act of smuggling him in the back door by her simple-minded brother Pat. Although Angela makes it upstairs and makes the Baby Jesus snug in her own bed, Pat feels duty bound to tell what he has seen.

"Mammy, Angela do have the Baby Jesus up the stairs. She have God in bed, so she do."

"Mother o' God," says Angela's mother, and she, Angela, and Pat are soon on their way back to St. Joseph's with the Baby Jesus wrapped inconspicuously in a black shawl. There they are met by Father Creagh and a policeman, who have just discovered the theft. Hearing Angela's story, the policeman teasingly asks, "Lord save us, should we arrest this one, Father, and put her in the Limerick Jail?" Brother Pat steps forward and offers to go to jail in his sister's place. "I love the Baby Jesus and I love my little sister," he says.

Father Creagh reassures Angela that Mother Mary always keeps the Baby Jesus warm when no one is looking, and the little girl gladly puts the figure back in his crib under the Holy Mother's watchful eye, where, as McCourt ends the story, "he smiled the way he always did and held out his arms to the world."

McCourt's gritty but humorous description of life in Depression-era Ireland keeps this slight, sweet story from sinking into the sentimental. Angela's naive yet tender concern for the Holy Child in the manger makes this family story a good one for sharing at Christmas time.