Page 91 - СКАЗКИ СНЕЖНОГО ЭЛЬФА

Snowyflake
There are loads of tales about Snow Maiden. Some of them
say she was once made of snow and then animated. But that is
not quite how it was. Snow Maiden used to be an ordinary girl.
What distinguished her from other children, was her extraordi-
nary kindness; she was always the first to come to help, never
cheated and was as good as her word. In fact, she was a very nice
girl. Her name was Snowyflake then. It was back in the time that
children got their names differently, not the way they do now.
Parents expected time to tell the name of their children. A child
happened to live nameless for a long while, called just Son or
Daughter, with the Mother’s name following. It sounded like
Birch Tear’s Son. But Snowyflake was given the name at her
birth. While the baby was being born, a violent snowstorm
came on. The father came into the house and bent over the
bed to see his newborn daughter. A few snowflakes fell from
his hair on the baby’s nose. It was what they started calling the
girl – Snowyflake.
Once on Christmas Eve it so happened that Snowyflake’s
mother fell ill, so very ill that people hardly believed she could
recover. Mum loved Christmas; she baked splendid pies and
roasted a goose, stuffed with apples , while singing wonderful
carols. They brought a beautiful fir-tree from the forest, then
decorated it, and it charged the home with the fir-tree needle
fragrance. But that year Father was grieving about Mother’s
illness so much that he didn’t think about a Christmas tree, it
would be too much of a holiday.
Snowyflake tried her best to decorate the room and make a
good dinner. Having done it, she sat down to relax.
‘Christmas tree… It doesn’t smell. Why?’ she heard her

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