Nine red bullfinches

In my last post I mentioned an anthology of Christmas stories I got as a child. You can tell I loved the book, it looks very used.
Barbara Bartos-Höppner had the idea for the book. She was a German writer and asked other writers she knew to write Christmas stories. She was surprised that some writers said you can't write stories about Christmas in our time anymore, our time being 1971 when the first edition was published (I was six years old). The only condition was that the stories had to be set between the first advent and Epiphany.
In the end she had 16 very different stories by 15 authors from several European countries.
Its title is "Weihnachtsgeschichten unserer Zeit - Bekannte Schriftsteller erzählen vom Weihnachtswunder" which translates to "Christmas stories of our time - Well-known authors tell of the Christmas miracle".
If you think it's all joy and sparkling lights, you are wrong. The stories are
- heartwarming when a kid gang goes carolling to make some money under the pretense of collecting for sick kids and then one of them spontaneously - and surprisingly to himself - donates the money for a school for deaf children in the last house they go to
- sad when the story is about a nurse in the war who is asked to accompany a group of girls from a children's home and one of the girls dies from appendicitis; the last sentence always made me cry as a child "I never found Helga's parents, though".
- realistic in the story about a separated couple who try to make Christmas nice for their two children despite their differences
- joyful in the story about the homesick boy in Brazil missing snow on Christmas and the girl who makes "snow" for him
- magical in my favorite story.

That story is by Katherine Allfrey, a German-British writer, it is called "White Christmas".

A few days before Christmas, a Christmas elf is born in the yew forest above the Five-Lords-Ground, a rare event that means a White Christmas.
The elf is born because drops of clear silver, a tiny pond from rain or dew, accumulate in the stump of the oldest tree in the forest and are found by a light of ray.
A sparkle awakes in the dark hole and the ray pulls the silver up into the open letting it sink to the ground where it grows and grows until the elf is born, slender like a flame, clear like ice, and bright as a gem. (Isn't that absolutely beautiful?)

Now the elf has three tasks to do for Christmas to become white.
He has to find nine red bullfinches (I love the German word "Gimpel" for them) on a twig, he has to ring the bells of the abandoned church in the Five-Lords-Ground, and he has to bring Jack Frost back from the North.
He doesn't know how to do it, but out of the light snow comes a guide, the last unicorn.
Firstly, the unicorn tells the elf what bullfinches are, but the elf can only find two of them until he stumbles on a paper that has been blown out of a car - and shows nine red bullfinches on a twig. If they are real, he doesn't know, but they are alive.

Male Eurasian bullfinch, Lancashire, UK
© Francis C. Franklin / CC-BY-SA-3.0,
via Wikimedia Commons

Next are the bells in the church, but the old church's walls are crumbling, the door is rotten, the roof has half collapsed - and there are no bells in the tower.
The elf decides to go look for Jack Frost first, a long, dark, and difficult flight for a bright being like him. On the highest of mountains he finds the giant Jack who has turned hard, but he follows the elf, bringing hail and storm with him.
The bullfinches are waiting in the church, but there are still no bells.
On a ledge, however, is a tuft of grasses, fully encased in ice, and when the elf walks by and grazes them, he can hear a little tinkle. Only the hands of an elf can ring those tiny bells with their ethereal chime. The unicorn almost dances with joy, and hearing the bells, Jack Frost turns from a grim giant into a mild king, and the dead, black forest into a shimmering white winter forest.

At midnight, the elf rings the bells again, the rotten door opens. Christmas angels fill the church, the unicorn lays down in front of the old altar, and the bullfinches sit to the left and right like little choristers and whisper.
And they celebrate the Holy Night together until the sun of Christmas morning rises above the white world.

Why a child like me, who never loved snow, loved that story so much, I have no idea. I think it's the peace I am feeling in it, and it's so beautifully written.

I would love to embroider those nine little bullfinches on their twig, hardly until Christmas, but I don't have to hurry it. It will come to me when I'm ready.