a
whole. Let us look first at the supernatural visitors, mimed by human
beings, who delight the minds of children, especially in Germany, on the
evening of December 24, and at the beliefs that hang around this most
solemn night of the year.

* * * * *

First of all, the activities of St. Nicholas are not confined to his own
festival; he often appears on Christmas Eve. We have already seen how he
is attended by various companions, including |230| Christ Himself, and
how he comes now vested as a bishop, now as a masked and shaggy figure.
The names and attributes of the Christmas and Advent visitors are rather
confused, but on the whole it may be said that in Protestant north
Germany the episcopal St. Nicholas and his Eve have been replaced by
Christmas Eve and the Christ Child, while the name Klas has become
attached to various unsaintly forms appearing at or shortly before
Christmas.

We can trace a deliberate substitution of the Christ Child for St.
Nicholas as the bringer of gifts. In the early seventeenth century a
Protestant pastor is found complaining that parents put presents in their
children's beds and tell them that St. Nicholas has brought them. "This,"
he says, "is a bad custom, because it points children to the saint, while
yet we know that not St. Nicholas but the holy Christ Child gives us all
good things for body and soul, and He alone it is whom we ought to call
upon."{1}

The ways in which the figure, or at all events the name, of Christ
Himself, is introduced into German Christmas customs, are often
surprising. The Christ Child, "Christkind," so familiar to German
children, has now become a sort of mythical figure, a product of
sentiment and imagination working so freely as almost to forget the
sacred character of the original. Christkind bears little resemblance to
the Infant of Bethlehem; he is quite a tall child, and is often
represented by a girl dressed in white, with long fair hair. He hovers,
indeed, between the character of the Divine Infant and that of an angel,
and is regarded more as a kind of good fairy than as anything else.

In Alsace the girl who represents Christkind has her face "made up" with
flour, wears a crown of gold paper with lighted candles in it--a parallel
to the headgear of the Swedish Lussi; in one hand she holds a silver
bell, in the other, a basket of sweetmeats. She is followed by the
terrible Hans Trapp, dressed in a bearskin, with bl