Some Christmas Stories

I HAVE been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that prettyGerman toy, a Christmas Tree.

The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, andtowered high above their heads.

It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; andeverywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects.

There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behindthe green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacityof 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 (wonderfullymade, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairyhousekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance thanmany real men-and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugarplums; 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, farbrighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; therewere guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, totell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles,conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitationapples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedlywhispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, "There was everything, and more." Thismotley collection of odd objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back the brightlooks directed towards it from every side-some of the diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on alevel 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 allthe trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their wildadornments at that well-remembered time.Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house awake, my thoughts are drawnback, by a fascination which I do not care to resist, to my own childhood.

I begin to consider, whatdo we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own young Christmasdays, by which we climbed to real life.