Continuing on the theme of chilly poor folk at Christmas time is this 1876 story by Feodor Dostoevsky in which a poor orphan child freezes to death on Christmas Eve and goes to heaven where he encounters other children:
And he discovered that these boys and girls were all children like himself; that some had frozen to death in the baskets in which they had been deposited on doorsteps; others had died in wretched hovels, whither they had been sent from the Foundlings’ Hospital; others again had starved to death at their mothers’ dried-up breasts; had been suffocated in the foul air of third-class railroad carriages. And now, here they were all angels, Christ’s guests, and He Himself was in their midst, extending His hands to them, blessing them and their poor, sinful mothers…. And the mothers stand there, a little apart, weeping; each one knows her little boy or girl; and the children fly up to them, and kiss them, and wipe away their tears with their tiny hands, and beg them not to weep, for they, the children, are so happy.