The twenty-eighth day before Christmas

Elizabeth Goudge is one of my favorite little-known authors.  She wrote historical and contemporary fiction, mostly around the time of the Second World War.  Some of her best known works are Green Dolphin Street (there's a horrible movie) and Gentian Hill.  My favorites are a book set in Elizabethan Oxford called Towers in the Mist and one of her contemporary novels, Pilgrim's Inn.  She has elements of fantasy in her work, but the settings and characters are very homely--it's something between George Eliot and George MacDonald, if that's even possible.

I Saw Three Ships is one of her later works, a Christmas story for children.

"In the country," she said, "there is not a farm that does not leave its doors unlocked day and night during the season of Christmas. At our farm Papa and Mamma offered hospitality to all who came. By day the kitchen was full of hungry people being fed, and by night the angels went up and down the stairs."

 From I Saw Three Ships by Elizabeth Goudge