Christmas

Christmas marks a brief promise of abundance in the workhouse, but it does not suspend the dangers and injustices shaping the children’s lives. Its place in the novel is both practical and emotional: the holiday offers a meal to anticipate, while dates near Christmas also measure the wait for change and sharpen the contrast between festive expectation and vulnerability.

The workhouse looks forward to Christmas

With a week to go, excitement ripples through the workhouse. Local women volunteer to come in and cook on Christmas Day, while the guardians provide a treat for every child. For Sunday Small, the memory of the previous year makes the promise tangible: she recalls a small orange, its sweetness unlike anything she had tasted before, followed by roast potatoes, goose, and vegetables far better than the food usually served in their bowls. The children hope they will receive the same meal again.

That collective anticipation sits beside private worry. Cissie Burns continues to be sick each morning, and Daisy Branning fears the sickness may signal a pregnancy, remembering that her mother had been ill while carrying a younger brother who did not survive birth. The children have been taught that a woman must be married to have a baby, so Daisy cannot readily make sense of what she suspects. When Miss Frost notices the smell of vomit and fixes her attention on Cissie, the ordinary signs of approaching Christmas give way to scrutiny and danger.

Festive expectation and Cissie’s removal

The events that follow turn the children’s hopes of care into a stark contrast with Cissie’s treatment. When a carriage arrives, Cissie recognizes it as the asylum carriage and protests that she had been promised somewhere she could care for her baby. She knows that Hatter’s Hall is not the safe destination she expected: in her understanding, those sent there are unlikely to be released, especially when no one will come to claim them. Miss Frost dismisses Cissie’s accusation against Albert Pinnegar and blames her instead, while the men struggle to put her in a straitjacket.

Sunday Small intervenes, kicking one of the men as he tries to force Cissie into the jacket. The Christmas season’s promise of a special meal cannot protect the girls from the workhouse’s power over them. Later, when Lady Lavinia Huntley asks whether Pinnegar was a kind master, Sunday recounts Cissie’s pregnancy, the false promise of a suitable placement, and her friend’s removal to Hatter’s Hall. The account gives the earlier episode its lasting consequence: Cissie’s disappearance remains a source of grief until Sunday learns that she is out of the asylum.

Christmas as a measure of waiting

Christmas also organizes expectations beyond the workhouse meal. In a later conversation, Ashley Huntley complains that Lavinia has not presented him with a son and says that Lewis and Felicity have set their wedding for two days before Christmas. He treats the date as part of a limited period still available to them, making the holiday a marker within his pressure on Lavinia to produce a male heir. Here, a date associated elsewhere with generosity and childhood pleasure becomes entangled with the demands of marriage and inheritance.

For Sunday, Christmas is also a point on the horizon of growing older and leaving the workhouse. She expects to turn fourteen in three weeks and hopes Daisy will leave soon after Christmas, when Daisy too will reach the age for placement. By then, Sunday is glad that Cissie is out of the asylum and looks forward to seeing her friends; she is also bashful at the thought of Jacob. These expectations make Christmas less a single festive scene than a threshold: a time against which the children measure hoped-for freedom, reunion, and change.

Significance in the novel

The holiday’s recurring force comes from the distance between what it promises and what the children can count on. A rare orange and a better-than-usual dinner are remembered as extraordinary precisely because everyday meals are poor. The communal meal suggests care, yet Cissie’s story shows that institutional authorities can still separate a young mother from the possibility of raising her child. Christmas therefore gathers together the novel’s contrasts between material scarcity and brief generosity, childhood hope and adult control, and the calendar’s promise of renewal and the uncertain wait for safety.