With our Season's Greetings we include, in the following pages, a Christmas story written by Marjorie L.C. Pickthall who, in her brief career, achieved distinction that place her among the immortals of Canadian literature.

It is something more than a mere story. It is a revelation of her own abiding belief in spiritual inspiration as the compelling motive of all great work, no matter what form that work may appear. It may be that the cabinet of sandalwood of which she writes was not actually made lovely by the means she describes, yet even so something wonderful did happen on that Christmas Eve to guide the hands that fashioned it.

This story, so typical of the delicacy and beauty of all her work, has for its setting a village in French Canada, and for its motif one of those fanciful tales that make so much for the charm of French-Canadian folklore. It is a Christmas story breathing the spirit of a Canadian genius who, though she has passed from among us, lives on in her work. 

From the introduction by Wilfrid C. Kettlewell & W. Harland Merry in the 1945 reprint of this story