The other piece I revisited this year was chapter 11 of P.L. Travers’s Mary Poppins, titled “Christmas Shopping”. It begins with Mary, Jane, and Michael getting off the bus:

 “I smell snow,” said Jane.

 “I smell Christmas trees,” said Michael.

 “I smell fried fish,” said Mary Poppins.

 The magic of Christmas, indeed. They’re at the “Largest Shop in the World, and they were all going into it to do their Christmas shopping.” Jane and Michael busy themselves choosing oh-so-appropriate gifts – a clockwork train for Daddy, a doll’s pram for Mother – with at least half an eye toward “borrowing” the presents in the future.

 Then, on their way out of the store, “the adventure happened.” In through the revolving door comes a child with “practically no clothes on, only a light wispy strip of blue stuff that looked as though she had torn it from the sky to wrap round her naked body.” This child runs up to Mary and the Banks children, and claims to know them all. She turns out to be Maia, the second of the Pleiades – a constellation of seven stars near Orion. “Some of them up there call us the Little Sisters,” she explains, “and sometimes we are called the Seven Doves, but Orion calls us ‘You girls’ and takes us hunting with him.”

 Maia has of course come down to Earth to do her own Christmas shopping. With Jane and Michael’s help, she chooses gifts for each of her sisters. Since “we have no money up there” and “the whole point of Christmas is that things should be given away,” she doesn’t have to pay for anything. When Jane points out that Maia doesn’t have a present for herself, Mary gives the star-child her own brand-new fur-topped gloves. After that, Maia climbs up into the air “as though there were invisible stairs cut into the grey sky”, until she disappears behind a cloud.

 As a kid I loved this chapter – a star coming to Earth to do her Christmas shopping! What’s not to love? I particularly enjoyed the list of presents chosen for each sister according to her interests. And Mary Shepard’s illustration of Maia climbing into the sky is the crowning touch.

It’s still a fun read.