THE CHRISTMAS-TREE.

The most widespread, and to children the most delightful, of all festal
institutions is the Christmas-tree. Its picturesqueness and gay charm
have made it spread rapidly all over Europe without roots in national
tradition, for, as most people know, it is a German creation, and even in
Germany it attained its present immense popularity only in the nineteenth
century. To Germany, of course, one should go to see the tree in all its
glory. Many people, indeed, maintain that no other Christmas can compare
with the German _Weihnacht_. "It is," writes Miss I. A. R. Wylie, "that
childish, open-hearted simplicity which, so it seems to me, makes
Christmas essentially German, or at any rate explains why it is that
nowhere else in the world does it find so pure an expression. The German
is himself simple, warm-hearted, unpretentious, with something at the
bottom of him which is childlike in the best sense. He is the last
'Naturmensch' in civilization." Christmas suits him "as well as a play
suits an actor for whose character and temperament it has been especially
written."{1}

|264| In Germany the Christmas-tree is not a luxury for well-to-do
people as in England, but a necessity, the very centre of the festival;
no one is too poor or too lonely to have one. There is something about a
German _Weihnachtsbaum_--a romance and a wonder--that English
Christmas-trees do not possess. For one thing, perhaps, in a land of
forests the tree seems more in place; it is a kind of sacrament linking
mankind to the mysteries of the woodland. Again the German tree is simply
a thing of beauty and radiance; no utilitarian presents hang from its
boughs--they are laid apart on a table--and the tree is purely splendour
for splendour's sake. However tawdry it may look by day, at night it is a
true thing of wonder, shining with countless lights and glittering
ornaments, with fruit of gold and shimmering festoons of silver. Then
there is the solemnity with which it is surrounded; the long secret
preparations behind the closed doors, and, when Christmas Eve arrives,
the sudden revelation of hidden glory. The Germans have quite a religious
feeling for their _Weihnachtsbaum_, coming down, one may fancy, from some
dim ancestral worship of the trees of the wood.

As Christmas draws near the market-place in a German town is filled with
a miniature forest of firs; the trees are sold by old women in quaint
costumes, and the shop-windows