“ Hallo! A great deal of steam! The pudding was out of the copper. A smell like a washing-day! That was the cloth. A smell like an eating-house and a pastry cook’s next door to each other, with a laundress next door to that! That was the pudding. In half a minute Mrs. Cratchit entered, flushed, but smiling proudly, with the pudding like a speckled cannon-ball, so hard and firm, blazing in half of half-a-quartern of ignited brandy, and bedight with Christmas holly stuck into the top. ”

“ Sidgwick tells us is to be seen “in any one of the old German cities in the hill country, when the streets and the open places are covered with crisp clean snow, and the mountains are white with it, and the moon shines on the ancient houses, and the tinkle of sledge bells reaches you when you escape from the din of the market, and look down at the bustle of it from some silent place, a high window, perhaps, or the high empty steps leading into the cathedral. The air is cold and still, and heavy with the scent of the Christmas trees brought from the forest for the pleasure of the children. ”

“ She opened it, and her candle shone on three old men standing outside in the snow. Their beards were as white as the snow, and so long that they reached the ground. Their eyes shone kindly in the light of Babouscka’s candle, and their arms were full of precious things—boxes of jewels, and sweet-smelling oils, and ointments.
“We have travelled far, Babouscka,” they said, “and we stop to tell you of the Baby Prince born this night in Bethlehem. He comes to rule the world and teach all men to be loving and true. We carry Him gifts. Come with us, Babouscka!” ”

“ Nobody can conceive or imagine all the wonders that are unseen and unseeable in the world.
You may tear apart the baby’s rattle and see what makes the noise inside, but there is a veil covering the unseen world which not the strongest man, nor even the united strength of all the strongest men that ever lived, could tear apart. Only faith, fancy, poetry, love, romance, can push aside that curtain and view and picture the supernal beauty and glory beyond. Is it all real? Ah, Virginia, in all this world there is nothing else real and abiding.
No Santa Claus! ”

“ The hundreds of booths are choked with toys, and gleam with thousands of little lights. In the open spaces the moving crowd of children, parents, and grandparents grows closer and closer between sunset and midnight, and every one is splitting the air with some sort of whistle, horn, or trumpet. Noise is the chief need of a successful Befana, and the first thing every one buys who comes must be a tin horn or one of the grotesque little figures made of painted clay, always with a whistle in some part of it. ”

“ On the frozen river by Peter’s city it is celebrated with a skating and sleighing carnival. Lines of track are laid down on the ice like small-sized street-car lines. Tiny cars run here and there along them, back and forth from the smooth ice-fields roped off for sleigh races or skating contests. Perhaps it was in that cold country he found the high cap, the furs, and the coat he wears for his hard work of chimney scrambling and running the reindeer express on the Christmas Eve we know. ”

“ Christmas Eve is the great time in Russia, but Santa Claus does not come until evening and the day before Christmas being a fast-day is usually somewhat depressing.
Old Mashinka, who comes in to open the heavy, outer shutters, usually has some lively gossip to tell while she lets in the light. Perhaps wolves slipped into the courtyard in the night and were fighting with the watch-dogs; perhaps the snow has fallen again and is so deep that Ivan and the stablemen have been out since daybreak cutting new paths to the kitchens, stables, and farm buildings, and breaking out the roads. ”

“ Christmas Peace
That sweetly prophetic evening silence, before the great feast of Good-Will, does not come over everything each year, even in a lonely cottage on an abandoned farm in Connecticut, than which you cannot possibly imagine anything more silent or more remote from the noise of the world. ”

“ How reverently we admired the gayly dressed pages who carried the Kings’ long trains, and the great camels whose heads and humps rose high above St. Joseph’s ass and the oxen!...
Many a time since those days I have been on the Arles road at this season when the robin and wren haunt the hawthorne hedges. The snail-gatherer still searches under the hedge and the owls hoot in the winter evening. But I see no more in the glory of the sunset clouds the banners of the Kings. ”

“ You might get your papa to hire men to watch in all the chimneys on Christmas Eve to catch Santa Claus, but even if they did not see Santa Claus coming down, what would that prove? Nobody sees Santa Claus, but that is no sign that there is no Santa Claus. The most real things in the world are those that neither children nor men can see. ”

“ A Dutch boy does not have to wait until December 25 for the great gift-day of the year. He is one of those who look for the gift-bringing saint on the eve of his own day which falls on December 6. For days beforehand the shops have been filled with toys and gaily trimmed, and on the evening of December 5 St. Nicholas is supposed by the little ones to make choice of the special treasure intended for little Dutch Jan or Martje. Indeed, it is one of the children’s treats to go out on that night to see the shops; and in the doorway of many of them stands a gorgeously clad likeness of the saint. ”

“ A glass of red wine is then sprinkled on the log, and the oldest and the strongest of the family together place it on the burning fire in such a way that the thick end of the log sticks out above the hearth for about a foot. And sometimes you may see a prudent father smear the end of it with honey and place on it a bowl of wheat, an orange, and the ploughshare, that they may be so warmed by the Christmas fire that the cattle shall be fed, the bees industrious, and the trees and fields be fruitful, through all the year. ”

“ On Christmas Eve, everything else used to pale before the exciting adventure of going to the church at midnight. After church came the Grand Supper, a family gathering from which the children were sent to bed long before they were ready to go, comforting themselves as they climbed the stair by asking each other, “What do you think P’tit Noël will put in your shoe?” But they were always too sleepy to lie awake long enough to see whose hand it was that dropped into each little shoe under the mantelpiece a few goodies or bits of silver coin. ”

“ And year by year as he grew taller, and remembered the Holy Night, the wind swept through his branches with a sound that was almost a moan; and ever since you can hear that sound from pine trees all the world over.
Now for hundreds of years after, on each Christmas Eve, the Christchild comes again, in the likeness of a poor child, gathering fallen sticks in the forest. Up and down the hills He goes, shivering in the icy cold, knocking at every door, whether it is of a cabin or a castle, until He finds some one who, remembering His lesson of love, calls Him in to find warmth and shelter ”

“ There is a Christmas tree after all, a tall one with a shining star at the top. Hundreds of burning candles light it up, and tiny wax figures dance among hanging oranges. At the foot of the tree lie four or five heaps of parcels,—ah, then, mother was shopping; no one is forgotten and every one is merry. Then comes Pavel to say that supper is ready. But the [Pg 82] white cloth looks very different from usual; it is not laid smoothly at all. Underneath it has been spread a layer of hay, and each one as he sits down pulls out a straw. ”

“ Christmas Greens
It is hard for you who have never felt the lack of heat and light to know what the long dark winter must have meant to the men of long ago who first kept the midwinter feast. Many of them really believed that as the days grew shorter and shorter, and the nights long and cold, there was danger that the sun might go out altogether and the whole world die in the darkness. ”

“ Where the Christmas Toys Come From
Almost all the wooden toys come from Germany, where peasants in the mountains of the Tyrol and Bavaria still make them by hand. A herd-boy on the hillside will see that his cattle are safely feeding in a narrow valley which they cannot leave without passing him, and then he will sit on the grass or on a rock and whittle and whistle or jodel as the soft wood shapes itself in his fingers, through a long summer day. ”

“ As he rises, a woman offers him a low wooden chair, but just as he seats himself draws it away so that he sits down hard upon the ground, and is thus supposed to fix to it firmly every good wish he has spoken. Finally he is wrapped in a thick blanket, and with it around him sits quietly for a few minutes while the young folks who are to tend the flocks and herds in the coming year come to the hearth and kiss each other solemnly across the Christmas log. ”

“ On Christmas Eve, or the Good Night, as the Spanish children say, every one must go to the church for the midnight mass, and of course no one goes to bed before that. Early in the dusk the toy dealers bring their booths and flaming naphtha torches to the village plaza, and the children swarm around them like flies to sweets. ”

“ A wooden temple is put up out on the ice, decorated with gilt and paintings within, and surrounded by a hedge of fir boughs without. A hole is made in the ice, and to this a long procession makes its way; troops with bright banners, gorgeously robed bishops, and priests carrying lighted tapers and big ikons, are followed by more soldiers, the Czar and Czarina in magnificently jewelled robes, and after them their Court brilliant in uniforms and beautiful fur-trimmed dresses. ”

“ Game, poultry, and other luxuries of the table were in brisk circulation in the villages; the grocers’, butchers’, and fruiterers’ shops were thronged with customers. The housewives were stirring briskly about, putting their dwellings in order; and the glossy branches of holly, with their bright red berries, began to appear at the windows. The scene brought to mind an old writer’s account of Christmas preparations: “Now capons and hens, besides turkeys, geese, and ducks, with beef and mutton—must all die; for in twelve days a multitude of people will not be fed with a little. ”

“ Now and then they stop to buy at some booth, or to greet a friend; one group attacks another with a specially strong burst of noise almost too much to stand when shrill whistles are brought close to ears, and there are shouts of laughter when the party which can make the most hideous noise drives off the other half deaf from the din. ”

“ Round and round the crowd moves in a stream of young, old, and middle-aged, all blowing horns and whistles with a ridiculously solemn persistency, bent on making all the noise it is possible to get out of one small toy. ”

“ Earthenware dishes an inch or two in depth are half filled with water, on the surface of which wheat is scattered, or the small, flattened seeds of the lentil, a leafy-stemmed plant whose honey-laden blossoms will, later in the year, draw swarms of golden bees to the fields where it is planted. ”

“ In the older parts of Montenegro, the head of the family and his shepherd boy still follow the quaint old custom of lighting the animals to their stalls on Christmas Eve. Each takes a lighted wax candle and they go together into every stall in turn, holding the candles for a moment in each of its corners. Then, at the stable door they take stand, one at each side of it, and hold their candles high while the little shepherdess drives the animals in. One by one, sheep, goats, and oxen, they pass between the flickering lights. ”

“ On another part of the river a great provision market is held a little before Christmas, and the booths stretch for miles. Everything is frozen. Countless oxen, piles of sheep and goats, pyramids of pigs, form a frozen range of hillocks to which the butcher comes to make his choice. With hatchet or saw he divides the animal, ox, or pig, or it may be a bear, into sections which his customers store in the ice-cellars which have all been freshly filled. ”

“ If all goes well, the eyes and the wig come next. The eyes are not made in this factory at all. They come from Germany, and it would probably give you a queer, scared feeling to see the making of them. Look into this long, dark room, and when your eyes are a little used to the strange shadowiness, you will see that down its sides there are rows of tables, before each of which sits a woman with a blue-flame gas lamp in front of her. ”

“ When it comes Christmas Eve, and the children are lying fast asleep, Babouscka comes softly through the snowy fields and towns, wrapped in her long cloak and carrying her [Pg 107] basket on her arm. With her staff she raps gently at the doors and goes inside and holds her candle close to the little children’s faces.
“Is He here?” she asks. “Is the little Christ Child here?” And then she turns sorrowfully away again, crying, “Farther on, farther on.” But before she leaves she takes a toy from her basket and lays it beside the pillow for a Christmas gift. ”

“ They are then dragged to the house, but are not taken inside until sunset; in the meantime they stand in the courtyard on either side the door. The house mother leaves her work as they are brought home to break a flat cake of purest wheat flour upon the longest log, while the little girls sing special songs. But soon she goes back to her work, for there is a deal to be done before sunset; the women are making Christmas cakes in the shape of lambs and chickens, and most often of little pigs with blunt-pointed noses and curly tails. ”

“ After the Christmas Dinner
When dinner had had time to settle and all the kitchen work was done, Father took his seat at the end of the long table, with all the household gathered about, the servants included and the baby without fail, and read the story of The Child: “And it came to pass in those days,” while Mother hushed the baby. Then we sang together “A Child is Born in Bethlehem,” which was the simplest of our hymns, and also the one we children loved best, for it told of how in heaven we were to walk to church
“On sky-blue carpets, star-bedeckt,”
which was a great comfort. ”