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Cultural Background |
Synopsis |
Warm-up Activity |
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Synopsis

1.
This article is about a six-year-old boy who did not know how poor his family was. Nothing was ever said to make him know that his father had lost his job and he had very little money to support the whole family. However, the boy discovered the truth of their situation on Christmas Eve. He figured out that he was one of the ¡° poor children¡± he looked for and felt sorry for. Severely hurt by the realization, he felt painfully sad and lost much of his hope for the future.
Childhood is usually regarded as a happy and carefree period of a man¡¯s life. In the west Christmas is a happy time, especially for children. In order to understand the painful experience the little boy underwent on Christmas Eve, the author choose Christmas as the background of the story which heightens its tragic effect.
2.
When reading story, we should pay attention to the subtlety and delicacy of the design of the story. The author purposefully put the contribution episode at the beginning of the story. The fact that the boy had to contribute to the poor children seems to exclude him, in the readers¡¯ as well as in his own expectation, from the poor. Poverty seems to be something remote. ¡° I had heard about poor children in stories¡±. This actually highlights the revelation ¡° We are poor!¡± and therefore makes the boy¡¯s confrontation with reality more bitter.
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