The Christmas Tree

Southland Times, Issue 21273, 19 December 1930, Page 19

The Christmas Tree

A Magnet of Magic

Hans Andersen and Others

The fir’s home was under the Northern lights of Norway, of Sweden, and of Denmark. Mrs Browning sang in 1861 how The North sent therefore a man of men As a grace to the South, And thus to Rome came Andersen. She never heard the pretty tale told to me by one dead who knew Jenny Lind and who, at her first London dinner when seventeen, had been asked to “take wine with Mr. Andersen.” Jenny Lind was in Rome at the same time as Hans, and met him in the street homesick and sad because he had no Christmas Tree. Away she hurried, bought a small fir, and bedecked it with the indispensable gilded nuts and apples. Then she sent for him, and these two elect spirits spent their festival together, with tender thoughts of home. Dates demolish any pleasant hypothesis that “The Fir Tree” was written afterwards, for it was one of the earliest of the tales told for all times. The fir tree was discontented from its very birth in the forest, “where the warm sun and fresh air made it a sweet resting place,” to the time when its sigh of regret sounded like "pop, pop” after it had been cut up to make a blazing fire. “Oh that I had enjoyed myself while I could, but now it is too late,” was its mournful reflection. The analysis of the matter from the tree’s standpoint is unique and fascinating. The climax of its life W’as when it became a Christmas Tree and “trembled so with joy in all its branches,” convinced its glories were to last for ever. The awakening—tossed aside in the garret—was a rude one. Yes, though the mice listened to the boastful history of the past, the rats wanted “something about lard and bacon” instead. “The Little Match-Girl.” A more glorious tree cheered “The Little Match-Girl” dying of cold and starvation. “She lighted another match and found herself sitting under a beautiful Christmas Tree. It was larger and more beautifully decorated than the one she had seen through the glass door at the rich merchant’s. Thousands of tapers were burning on the green branches.” Then came her kind grandmother, now an angel with wings, and “they both flew upwards to brightness and joy.” When they found her dead with her burnt, matches “she tried to warm herself,” said some, “but none imagined what beautiful things she had seen, or into what glory she had entered.”

'Like Hans Andersen, Mrs Ewing touches on the tangible and visionary in the exquisite “Three Christmas Trees.” The rare qualities of perfect simplicity and perfect English arc here. To turn to “The Blue

Bird” is to find the Christmas Tree seen by the small barefoot hungry’ peasants from the frosty windowpane of their poor home. There is hardly any lesson of the sweet side of unselfishness more charmingly’ conveyed than this lesson taught by’ Maeterlinck. Dickens. Last, yet first, Dickens—who, indeed, would have been first had he only written his brief essay, “The Christmas Tree,” instead of populating all the realm of Christmas and becoming its king. Here we find Dickens the Christian meeting us with sunny jest and sober earnest in these few pages of “The Christmas Tree” t I have been looking this evening at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy Christmas-tree—-with real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity for being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, and other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully’ made in tin at Wolverhampton, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping). There were jolly broad-faced little men much more agreeable in person than real men, and no wonder for their heads took off and showed them to be full of sugar plums. Then comes a Dickensian musing over his Land of Lost Joys:— Oh, the Dolls’ House! of which I was not proprietor but where I visited. I don’t admire the Houses of Parhament as much as that stone-fronted mansion with real glass windows. Oh, the warming pan and a tin man-cook in profile who was always going to fry the fish. What Barmecide justice have I done to the noble feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured each with its own peculiar delicacy as a ham or turkey glued tightly on to it and garnished with something green, I recollect as moss. Could all the temperance societies, of these later days united give me such a tea drinking as I have had through the means of yonder little set of blue crockery, which really would hold liquid (it ran out of the small wooden cask, I recollect, and tasted of matches, and which made tea nectar!) ?... Upon the next branches of the tree the books began to hang. I felt if I could have married Little Red Riding Hood I should have know perfect bliss. But it was not to be! Oh, the wonderful Noah’s Ark. It was not found seaworthy when put in a washing tub and the animals were crammed in at the roof— and then ten to one they began to tumble out at the door, which was but imperfectly fastened with a wire latch. What was that against it: consider the noble fly a size or two smaller than the elephant!.. .Consider Noah and his family like idiotic bottle stoppers!....