Читать книгу Mimi and the Mountain Dragon - Michael Morpurgo - Страница 10

for a night. In winter-time, snow would cut the village off from the rest of the world for months on end. Families and their animals huddled together under the same roof, to keep warm, to survive. And in summer-time, every daylight hour was spent growing and harvesting corn and hay and straw, gathering berries and herbs and mushrooms from the mountainsides, fattening the pigs and sheep, making cheese, and bringing in enough firewood from the forests.

By Christmas each year they were in the depths of winter, and everyone was longing for the dark nights to shorten, for the snows to melt away in spring, for sunshine to light up the world. But Christmas for the villagers then wasn’t simply to celebrate the promise of spring to come, or even the birth of a baby in Bethlehem 2,000 years before. All the singing of carols, the ringing of bells,