The Birds' Christmas Carol is a novel by Kate Douglas Wiggin printed privately in 1886 and published in 1888[1] with illustrations by Katharine R. Wireman. Wiggin published the book to help fund the Silver Street Free Kindergarten, which she founded in 1878.[1]The story is about Carol Bird, a Christmas-born child, a young girl who is unusually loving and generous, having a positive effect on everyone with whom she comes into contact. She is the youngest member of her family and has several devoted older brothers. At about the age of 5, Carol contracts an unspecified illness (possibly tuberculosis), and, by the time she is 10, she is bedridden; physicians say that she does not have long to live. Most of the brief novel's plot involves Carol making plans for a Christmas celebration for the nine Ruggles children, a poor, working-class family living near the Birds.Wiggin's story is primarily a moral tale about a saintly child, but unlike many other such stories of the period, Carol is refreshingly intelligent and cheerful instead of pious. The story is also enlivened by many humorous touches, particularly in the scenes of the Ruggles family's home life...Kate Douglas Wiggin(September 28, 1856 - August 24, 1923) was an American educator and author of children's stories, most notably the classic children's novel Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. She started the first free kindergarten in San Francisco in 1878 (the Silver Street Free Kindergarten). With her sister during the 1880s, she also established a training school for kindergarten teachers. Kate Wiggin devoted her adult life to the welfare of children in an era when children were commonly thought of as cheap labor.Wiggin went to California to study kindergarten methods. She began to teach in San Francisco with her sister Nora Smith assisting her, and the two were instrumental in the establishment of over 60 kindergartens for the poor in San Francisco and Oakland. She moved from California to New York, and having no kindergarten work on hand, devoted herself to literature. She sent The Story of Patsy and The Bird's Christmas Carol to Houghton, Mifflin & Co. who accepted them at once. Besides the talent for story-telling, she was a musician, sang well, and composed settings for her poems. She was also an excellent elocutionist. Her first literary work was Half a Dozen Housekeepers, a serial story which she sent to St. Nicholas. After the death of her husband in 1889, she returned to California to resume her kindergarten work, serving as the head of a Kindergarten Normal School. Some of her other works included Cathedral Courtship, A Summer in a Canon, Timothy's Quest, The Story Hour, Kindergarten Chimes, Polly Oliver's Problem, and Children's RightsEarly lifeKate Douglas Wiggin House in the Salmon Falls section of Hollis, MaineKate Douglas Smith Wiggin was born in Philadelphia, the daughter of lawyer Robert N. Smith, and of Welsh descent. Kate herself experienced a happy childhood, even though it was coloured by the American Civil War and her father's death. Kate and her sister Nora were still quite young when their widowed mother moved her little family from Philadelphia to Portland, Maine, then, three years later, upon her remarriage, to the little village of Hollis. There Kate matured in rural surroundings, with her sister and her new baby brother, Philip.From a literary point of view her childhood was most distinctive for her encounter with the novelist Charles Dickens. Her mother and another relative had gone to hear Dickens read in Portland, but Wiggin, aged 11, was thought to be too young to warrant an expensive ticket. The following day, however, she found herself on the same train as Dickens and engaged him in a lively conversation for the course of the journey, an experience which she later detailed in a short memoir, A Child's Journey with Dickens (1912)...