What the March sisters from Little Women would have put on their Christmas wishlists

"Christmas won't be Christmas without any presents," grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

That's the first line of Little Women. In the chapter that follows, Father is away at the war, and Marmee has proposed no presents this year because "it is going to be a hard winter for everyone." Each of the four March sisters has a dollar of her own, and within a page each one says what she wants: Jo a book, Beth new music, Amy drawing pencils, and Meg, who thinks "regretfully of all the pretty things she wanted."

Here's what I think each of their wishlists would look like.

Meg

Meg is the oldest, sixteen when the book opens, and the sister who minds being poor the most. Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

"If I only had a silk!" Meg sighs in chapter three, and Marmee tells her she may have one when she's eighteen, perhaps. She doesn't have to wait that long: the next Christmas, Mr. Laurence gives her her first silk dress. In Good Wives, the second half of the story, published in 1869, Meg is a young wife on a tight budget. She sees a violet silk going at a bargain and buys it for fifty dollars, half of it out of the household money. At home it "looked less silvery now," and she can't stop thinking about the fifty dollars.

The gloves come from the New Year's Eve dance in chapter three. Meg's gloves aren't as nice as she'd like, and Jo's are spoiled with lemonade. "Gloves are more important than anything else," Meg says. "You can't dance without them." Their fix is for each sister to wear one good glove and carry a bad one. Meg also chose a nice pair of gloves as her own Christmas present for Marmee.

The jelly is for the chapter called Domestic Experiences, where Meg decides to put up her own currant jelly. John brings home four dozen little pots and half a barrel of sugar, she spends a long day picking, boiling and straining, and the jelly "wouldn't 'jell'."

Jo

Jo is fifteen and a writer. Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

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The book Jo wants to spend her dollar on is Undine and Sintram, two romances by the German writer Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué. Undine, from 1811, is about a water spirit who marries a knight to gain a soul, and it was popular enough that The Times wrote in 1843 that if you asked for it at a library abroad, you'd be sure to find it already checked out. Jo gets her copy a year later, at the Christmas in chapter 22, "slapping the pocket wherein reposed the long-desired Undine and Sintram." The two aren't sold together anymore, so the link is a reprint of Undine with Arthur Rackham's illustrations.

The pen is for Jo's "scribbling suit," which she puts on whenever she shuts herself in to work on her novel: "a black woolen pinafore on which she could wipe her pen at will, and a cap of the same material, adorned with a cheerful red bow." Her family can tell from the cap whether to interrupt her.

The throw and the apples come from Jo's favorite spot. Meg finds her in the garret "eating apples and crying over the Heir of Redclyffe, wrapped up in a comforter on an old three-legged sofa by the sunny window," where she likes to retreat "with half a dozen russets and a nice book." The Roxbury Russet was found in Roxbury, Massachusetts, in the mid-1600s and is believed to be the oldest apple variety bred in the United States. The throw is from Faribault Mill in Minnesota, which started up in 1865, three years before Little Women came out.

Beth

Beth is thirteen, shy, and the one who reminds everyone, "We've got Father and Mother, and each other." Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

In chapter one, Beth says "I planned to spend mine in new music" with "a little sigh, which no one heard but the hearth brush and kettle-holder."

Beth actually gets the piano. In chapter six she sews a pair of slippers for old Mr. Laurence next door, and he sends back a little cabinet piano with a letter: "I like to pay my debts, so I know you will allow 'the old gentleman' to send you something which once belonged to the little grand daughter he lost." The modern version of a little cabinet piano is a compact digital one.

Beth has a cat and three kittens early in the book, and at the chapter 22 Christmas, Jo and Laurie build her a snow maiden whose poem offers "a ribbon red, I beg, for Madam Purrer's tail."

Amy

Amy is the youngest, twelve, and the artist. Her sisters call her "Little Raphael." Pick the items you want with "Add to wishlist," or take the whole list with the button at the bottom:

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Amy is the only sister who names a brand: "I shall get a nice box of Faber's drawing pencils; I really need them." That's the same company that makes Faber-Castell pencils today. Kaspar Faber started making pencils in Stein, near Nuremberg, in 1761, and the company opened a New York branch in 1849, so Faber pencils were on sale in America well before Little Women was written. Amy also plans to spend part of her dollar on cologne for Marmee, because "it won't cost much, so I'll have some left to buy my pencils."

The limes come from chapter seven, Amy's Valley of Humiliation. Pickled limes are the fashion at her school, where the girls trade them for pencils, bead rings and paper dolls, and Amy owes "at least a dozen." When she finally brings in twenty-four, her teacher declares them contraband and makes her throw them out the window two at a time, to a shout from the children in the street below.

The trip happens in Good Wives, when Aunt Carrol takes Amy to Europe. In a letter home she writes that at Hampton Court she saw "Raphael's cartoons," the full-size designs he drew for a set of tapestries.

In conclusion

Little Women is free on Project Gutenberg if you want to reread the first two chapters before Christmas. Take whichever sister's list is closest to the person you're shopping for and make it your own.

The illustration at the top is "They all drew to the fire," Jessie Willcox Smith's frontispiece for the 1915 edition of Little Women.