![]() ![]() As printed ephemera, it was a manufactured commodity, like a china mug or a fortune-telling game, in contrast to something made by hand for home use, like a needlebook or a pin cushion. We also get a glimpse of the kind of thing it was. ![]() Although she also mentions in her letter a fine piano player acquaintance, and in an earlier part of the letter discusses her music lessons and practice-in short, although music as music is on her mind-when it comes to “a sheet of music,” Dickinson takes her cue from its status as a thing. ![]() It is striking that Dickinson does not refer to her new sheet of music by its title or even by its musical genre-a waltz, an air, a variation. With this reference to the “sheet of music” on her list of holiday booty, we get a glimpse of the way that music entered Dickinson’s life: as an object. I found abundance of candy in my stocking, which I do not think has had the anticipated effect upon my disposition, in case it was to sweeten it, also two hearts at the bottom of all, which I thought looked rather ominous but I will not enter into any more details, for they take up more room than I can spare. I had a perfume bag and a bottle of otto of rose to go with it, a sheet of music, a china mug with Forget me not upon it, from S.S.,-who, by the way, is as handsome, entertaining, and as fine a piano player as in former times,-a toilet cushion, a watch case, a fortune-teller, and an amaranthine stock of pin-cushions and needlebooks, which in ingenuity and art would rival the works of Scripture Dorcas. I hung up my stocking on the bedpost as usual. …Old Santa Claus was very polite to me the last Christmas. In January of 1846, when she had just turned fifteen, Emily Dickinson wrote to her dear friend Abiah Root with updates about her recent studies, local news, inquiries about common friends, and a detailed accounting of the contents of her Christmas stocking. ![]()
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