Contents:
A Christmas Tree
What Christmas is as we Grow Older
The Poor Relation's Story
The Child's Story
The Schoolboy's Story
Nobody's Story
A CHRISTMAS TREE
I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children
assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree
was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high
above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of
little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright
objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green
leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least,
and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable
twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads,
wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic
furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched
among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping;
there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in
appearance than many real men--and no wonder, for their heads took
off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles
and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes,
sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were
trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold
and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there
were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in
enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were
teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles,
conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially
dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts,
crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me,
delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend,
"There was everything, and more." This motley collection of odd
objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back
the bright looks directed towards it from every side--some of the
diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and
a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty
mothers, aunts, and nurses--made a lively realisation of the fancies
of childhood; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and
all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their
wild adornments at that well-remembered time.
Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house
awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not
care to resist, to my own childhood. I begin to consider, what do
we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our
own young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.
Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its
growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy
tree arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top--
for I observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to
grow downward towards the earth--I look into my youngest Christmas
recollections!
All toys at first, I find.
