Welcome to another installment of Christmas in quarantine.

It's Christmas past's impromptu miniseries of indeterminate length, and it's all about bringing

you some extra Christmas cheer amidst all this uncertainty with the COVID-19 crisis.

Speaking of which, here we are at the beginning of May, and it looks like some places around

the country are trying to get back to normal, and others are coming up with their plan for

doing so.

I hope that wherever you are, you're staying safe and healthy, you're practicing all of the

common-sense guidelines, and treating the situation with the seriousness it deserves.

This time around, we're doing another classic Christmas

story. It's the 1876 story by Dostoevsky called the Heavenly Christmas Tree. Fair warning,

this story is a sad one, and also one that contains a couple of religious references, which I know

is something I don't normally do here on Christmas past, so take it or leave it, but I think you'll enjoy the story anyway. I'll come back at the end to say goodbye, but for now,

please enjoy The Heavenly Christmas Tree by Fyodor Dostoevsky.

I am a novelist, and I suppose that I have made up this story.

I write, I suppose, though I know for a fact that I have made it up, but yet I keep fancying that it must have happened somewhere at some time, and that it must have happened on Christmas

Eve, in some great town, in a time of terrible frost.

I have a vision of a boy, a little boy, six years old, or even younger.

This boy woke up that morning in a cold, damp cellar.

He was dressed in a sort of white dressing gown and was shivering with cold.

There was a cloud of white steam from his breath, and sitting on a box in the

corner, he blew the steam out of his mouth and amused himself in his dullness, watching it float away.

But he was terribly hungry. Several times that morning, he went up to the plank bed where his

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