It was a bitterly cold New Year’s Eve. The night had grown very late.
Snow was falling.

A poor little girl was wandering through the dark, frozen streets.

She wore no hat. Her feet were bare.

She had left home with shoes on,  but they were far too large, her mother’s old ones. When she ran across the road to escape two fast-moving carriages, both shoes flew off.

One could not be found at all.One was lost.

The other was snatched by a boy who ran away laughing, saying he would use it as a cradle when he had children of his own.

And so the little girl walked on barefoot, her small feet raw and blue with cold.

Her old apron was full of matches. She carried another bundle in her hand.

All day long, not a single person had bought her matches.

Not one coin had been pressed into her palm.

The poor little thing was cold and hungry, and utterly wretched.

Snowflakes settled on her golden hair, which curled beautifully around her face, but she had no thought for that.

Every window glowed with warm light.

The smell of roast goose drifted through the streets.

It was New Year’s Eve, after all.

She could not forget that.

She found a corner where one house jutted out a little further than the next.

There she crouched down, tucking her feet beneath her.

But she felt colder than before.

She did not dare go home.

She had sold no matches. She had earned nothing.

Her father would beat her.

And home was almost as cold as the street,

just a roof over their heads, the worst cracks stuffed with rags and straw,

but the wind still came through.

Her small hands were nearly frozen.

Oh,  how much good one little match would do.

If only she dared pull one from the bundle, strike it against the wall, warm her fingers for a moment.

She dared.

Scratch!

The flame leapt up.

She cupped it in her hands. It burned like a small candle. Bright, steady, warm.

How strange and beautiful that light seemed to her.

She imagined she was sitting before a great iron stove,

its brass feet and handles gleaming.

Inside it a fire blazed, and the warmth spread all through her.

But what was happening?

Just as she stretched her feet toward it, the flame went out. The stove was gone.

She was still in the corner, holding a burnt-out matchstick.

She struck another match.

The flame rose bright. Where it fell on the wall, the stone turned transparent as gauze. She could see straight through into the room beyond.

A table laid with a white cloth. Fine china. Candles.

And a roast goose, golden and steaming, stuffed with apples and prunes.

Then, more wonderful still, the goose climbed down from the dish,

and waddled across the floor toward her, the carving knife still in its back.

It came straight toward her.

The match went out.

The thick, black wall returned.

She lit another match.

This time she was sitting beneath a Christmas tree.

It was larger and more beautiful than any she had glimpsed through the glass doors of the grand merchant’s house last Christmas. Thousands of candles burned on its branches.

Coloured pictures, just like the ones she had pressed her nose against in the shop windows, hung from every bough.

She reached out both hands toward them.

The match went out.

The Christmas candles rose higher and higher until they became stars.

One fell, streaking a long bright line across the dark sky.

“Someone is dying,” the little girl thought, for her grandmother, the only person who had ever truly loved her, had once told her: “When a star falls, a soul goes up to God.”

She struck another match against the wall.

And there was her grandmother.

Clear and bright in the glow. She looked so gentle. So full of joy.

“Grandmother!” the child cried.

“Oh, take me with you. I know when the match goes out you will be gone, just like the warm stove, and the goose, and the beautiful tree.”

She struck the whole bundle at once,

she wanted so desperately to keep her grandmother near.

The light blazed up like daylight.

Her grandmother had never seemed so tall, so radiant, so beautiful.

She gathered the little girl into her arms, and together, in that bright and joyful light,

they rose, up and away from the earth, higher and higher，

to where there is no cold,

no hunger,

no pain，

for they were going to be with God.

In the cold light of the new morning,

the little girl was still there, in the corner between the two houses.

Her cheeks were flushed. She was smiling.

She was dead.

Frozen to death on the last night of the old year.

The first light of the New Year fell on that small, still body.

In her hand she still clutched the burnt-out bundle of matches.

“She must have been trying to warm herself,” people said.

But no one knew

what beautiful things she had seen.

No one knew

that in the first light of the New Year,

she and her grandmother had gone together somewhere beyond all cold.