Mr. Finnegan's Giving Chest - Dan Farr

by Tristi Pinkston | More from this Blogger

28 Dec 2006 09:34 AM

Christmas shouldn't end just because the day itself has come and gone. With that in mind, I'd like to share with you one of the gifts our children received from their grandparents this year - a picture book entitled "Mr. Finnegan's Giving Chest."

Maggie is a bully. She enjoys picking on children at school and has very little compassion for their feelings. It gets worse around Christmas time. She hates the season; it brings out all of her little beasty tendencies.

One day Maggie's coat gets snagged on a fence while she's chasing a little boy from school, and she finds herself stuck. Along comes Mr. Finnegan, a mysterious toy maker, holding a screwdriver in his hand and accompanied by a robot dog he made himself. After setting her free, Mr. Finnegan asks Maggie to come to his shop. He has a job for her to do.

Maggie has never been inside such a wonderful store. It's filled with toys and wonderful gifts, and Mr. Finnegan explains to her that everything in the store has a special purpose, somewhere specific that it needs to go. He uses a magic chest to ensure that every gift goes to the right person, and to demonstrate, he asks Maggie to open it up.

When she lifts the lid, Maggie is shocked to see a pendant lying inside the chest. Her beloved grandmother had died last Christmas, and it was her final wish that her pendant be sold to help the needy, but her children thought she should be buried with it, and so she was. When Maggie saw it in the chest, she didn't want to believe it, thinking that Mr. Finnegan was trying to make her believe in ghosts. Not ghosts, he explained, angels. Her grandmother wanted her to have the necklace.

Feeling stubborn, Maggie changes the subject and asks what her job is. Mr. Finnegan gives her the chest and asks her to deliver it to a certain address.

As Maggie is walking along, she encounters many people in need, and out of curiosity, opens the chest to find just what that person should have. She gives a quilt to a cold woman and a cane to a man with a limp. Each time she gives something away, she becomes happy inside, a feeling she's not used to having.

When at last she reaches the address, an accident causes her to break the chest, and she feels terrible. Raising her hand to knock, she is surprised when the little boy she was trying to beat up earlier in the day answers the door. She discovers that he is an orphan, and she has been sent to deliver the chest to the orphanage, but now that the chest is broken, how will the orphans get what they most want for Christmas?

This book is the story of unselfishness and sharing. I hope that we can all keep the warm feelings we had during the Christmas holiday all through the year and remember that we create the spirit of Christmas every day with the care we take of each other. Look for Dick Van Dyke as Mr. Finnegan and listen along as he reads the CD that comes with the book.

(This book was published by Shadow Mountain in 2005 and illustrated using 3-D imaging from DAZ Productions.)

Related Blogs:

The Modern Magi

Skipping Christmas

Children's Picture Books about the Snow

Learn more about Tristi Pinkston

I've been a blogger for Families.com since August of 2006.

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