Good evening. Welcome to the Just Sleep podcast. I'm Tasia, your host.

Every week, I will read you an old story to help you relax

of the stressful day behind you and drift off to sleep.

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Rest assured, there will be no ads during or after the story.

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It's December, and it's time for some Christmas stories.

Tonight, I will be reading A Christmas Accident by Annie Elliott Trumbull.

So lie down, close your eyes, and let me read you a story.

At first, the two yards were as much alike as the two houses, each house being the exact

copy of the other.

They were just two of those little red brick dwellings that one is always seeing side by side

in the outskirts of a city, and looking as if the occupants must be alike too.

But these two families were quite different. Mr. Gilton, who lived in one, was a pretty

cross sort of man, and was quite well to do, as cross people sometimes are. He and his wife lived

alone, and they did not have much going out and coming in either. Mrs. Gilton would have liked

more of it, but she had given up thinking

about it, her husband had said so many times that it was women's tomfoolery to want to have people

whom you weren't anything to, and who weren't anything to you, ringing your doorbell all the time

and bothering around in your dining room, which of course it was,

and she would have been believed if a woman ever did believe anything a man says a great many

...