#Article Launch Challenge#It's Christmas again, and the shops on the roadside are dressed up for Christmas. Looking at the festive atmosphere revealing joy, I don't know what's going on, I suddenly remembered the "Little Match Girl" I learned when I was a child, and I also had a question in my heart, why did the little girl sell matches on Christmas Eve?
The story of "The Little Match Girl".
"The Little Match Girl" is a fairy tale written by Danish writer Hans Christian Andersen, which tells the story of a little girl wearing thin clothes and her mother's slippers, selling matches on the street on a cold Christmas night.
It was Christmas, the sky was full of goose feathers and snow, and pedestrians were wrapped in clothes and hurriedly wanted to return to their warm homes and reunite with their families as soon as possible. The little girl in thin clothes struggled to sell matches, but no one bought her matches.
It was late at night, and the little girl was cold and hungry, but she did not dare to go home for fear that her father would beat her. She could only huddle alone in the corner of a house, shivering. To keep warm, she struck the first match and saw the fragrant roast chicken, the second match she saw the beautiful Christmas tree, and the third match she saw her grandmother. In order to keep her grandmother around, the little girl lit a whole match, but when the match went out, everything was gone, and the little girl died.
The origin of the creation of "The Little Match Girl".
According to Andersen's autobiography, Andersen, who was already a famous writer at the time, was a guest at the home of a duke in Germany.
A publisher came to the door with three different woodcuts and wanted to give them to him. The only requirement is for him to choose a painting and write a fairy tale based on the content of the painting. So Andersen chose and chosen, and finally decided on the painting to write the story. The painting depicts a poor little girl sitting there with many matchboxes on her skirt and a match in her hand.
Based on the picture sketched in this painting, Andersen looked at the extravagant Duke's mansion and conceived this fairy tale about poverty, "The Little Match Girl".
The prototype of "The Little Match Girl".
Why did Hans Christian Andersen write "The Little Match Girl"? In fact, it is closely related to his own experience.
Andersen was born in Denmark in 1805 to a poor family, his father was a shoemaker, and his mother supported the family by helping people or begging. Despite the poverty of the family, Andersen's parents were very kind to him and gave him the most love. Usually his father would play with him and make him toys, while her mother would tell him stories about her own childhood: she was often kicked out by her parents to beg, and if she didn't, she would cry under the bridge by the river.
But the good times did not last long, and when Andersen was 11 years old, Andersen's father died of illness. His mother remarried, and he went to charity school to learn writing and Xi. In addition to intermittent Xi, Andersen was forced to work as a child laborer in a textile factory in order to make a living.
Due to his thin stature, Andersen, who only had his stepfather, was often bullied, so Andersen left the textile factory and lived with his grandmother. But the good times didn't last long, his grandmother also passed away, and he had to go to the street to sell small goods under the arrangement of his stepfather.
During this time, Denmark was involved in the war, fell into an economic crisis, prices skyrocketed, many people went bankrupt, and the streets were full of children struggling to survive, some working as newspaper boys selling newspapers, some begging in rags. As one of them, Hans Christian Andersen, every scene is engraved in his heart.
Therefore, the actual prototype of "The Little Match Girl" is Hans Christian Andersen himself and those struggling children.
The little girl was wearing her mother's slippers, but Hans Christian Andersen was wearing his mother's shoes, selling matches at Christmas was actually something he and the children had experienced, he didn't dare to go home, he had a stepfather, and the little girl lit matches and saw his grandmother, because he missed his grandmother.
Many fairy tales come from reality, but reality is mostly more tragic. In the fairy tale, Andersen reciprocated the greatest tenderness to the little match girl:
"The little girl's good grandmother flew away in light and joy, and flew higher and higher, to a place where there was no cold, no hunger, and no pain. ”
Now that everyone is celebrating Christmas, there are hardly any children who are frozen in the cold wind, and perhaps Andersen's dream has finally come true in the East.