Every year, NPR asks a writer to compose an original story with a Christmas
theme. In 2008, Gregory Maguire reinvented the Hans Christian Andersen classic
"The Little Match Girl" for a new time and new audiences.
When it was first translated from Danish and published in England in the
mid-nineteenth century, audiences likely interpreted the Little Match Girl′s
dying visions of lights and a grandmother in heaven as metaphors of religious
salvation. Maguire′s new piece, entitled "Matchless," reilluminates Andersen′s
classic, using his storytelling magic to rekindle Andersen′s original
intentions, and to suggest transcendence, the permanence of spirit, and the
continuity that links the living and the dead.