The Blossoming Rod (Illustrated Edition)

A Christmas Story

The Blossoming Rod, a 66-page short story by Mary Stewart Cutting, is all about a certain happy little family and their plot to give the head of the house just exactly the gift he wanted for Christmas -- a thing which is apt to happen more frequently in books than elsewhere. Sub-titled A Christmas Story it is permeated with the spirit of the day and enveloped in a happy mood.

This edition of the book contains the two original illustrations, rejuvenated, and 10 additional Christmas illustrations that are unique to this edition of the book.

Mary Stewart Doubleday Cutting was the daughter of Civil War Brevet Brigadier General Ulysses Doubleday and his wife, née Mary Stewart. She was the granddaughter of Ulysses F. Doubleday, who served in the War of 1812 and was elected to both the Twenty-second and Twenty-fourth Congresses. She was the niece of General Abner Doubleday.

While Mary Stewart (Doubleday) Cutting was presenting her work publicly as early as 1872, when a poem of hers was published in Lippincott's Monthly Magazine, she only began publishing professionally in earnest after her husband's death in 1893. It should be noted that she published under the name Mary Stewart Cutting; listings today often include her maiden name of Doubleday to distinguish her work from that of her daughter, also Mary Stewart Cutting (Jr.).

Her works fall under the general classification of domestic realism, a type of fiction popular with women in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Some of Cutting's work focuses on navigating courtship and marriage, while other of her work, coming at the very end of the nineteenth century and throughout the first two decades of the twentieth century, reflects more of a societal shift in how women were beginning to assert, in particular, financial capability and independence.