Hello and welcome to the Storytime for grown-ups' Christmas Spectacular.

I'm Faith Moore, and for the months of November and December, we'll be reading A Little

Princess by Francis Hodgson Burnett.

Each episode, I'll read one chapter from the book, pausing from time to time to give brief explanations, so it's easier to follow along.

It's like an audiobook with built-in notes.

So gather your family together, brew a pot of tea, or a mug of hot chocolate, find a cozy chair, and settle in.

It's story time.

Music a cozy chair and settled in. It's story time. Hi, everyone. Welcome back. Gosh, we really are getting close to the end of this book. I can't believe it. I don't know how

it happened. I know I keep saying this. The time is just flying by, though. And we've got today,

and then two more episodes of the book, and then one more episode to wrap things up for our

conclusion on December 22nd. And I think you can kind of start to feel

now that the book is in the final stretch. There are these elements that are starting to kind of pop

up so that we can see on the horizon maybe what is coming at the end. It's not quite clear exactly

what it's going to be, but there are these little inklings coming, and that's really fun and exciting. So I'm really excited to be reading this book with you. This is actually kind of a long chapter that we're going to be reading today. It's just one chapter. It's chapter 15, but it's a bit long. So I'm going to try to keep things a little bit brief at the beginning, but I do have some reminders and I do have some great questions to discuss.

So we're going to do all of that, but that's why the episode is a little longer. You may have noticed when you opened up your podcast player. Hopefully that's a good thing. Hopefully you're like, yay, more story time for grownups and not like, oh, no, it's really long. So let's get right to it. So the first thing to announce today is the winner of our current prize drawing.

So for the past two weeks or so, Let's get right to it. So the first thing to announce today is the winner of our current prize

drawing. So for the past two weeks or so, we have had a prize drawing open for a membership in our

online community, the drawing room, at the landed gentry level, which is currently our highest

membership level. It entitles you to be a part of the drawing

room and chat with your friends over there and all the various channels and to join us for our

monthly voice chats, which are called tea time. So the winner is going to get that membership.

So today I'm going to announce the winner and then on Monday, so Monday,

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