are full of candles and ornaments to deck
them. Mrs. Alfred Sidgwick in her "Home Life in Germany" gives a
delightful picture of such a Christmas market in "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....
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.
Day by day you see the rows of them growing thinner, and if you go to the
market on Christmas Eve itself you will find only a few trees left out in
the cold. The market is empty, the peasants are harnessing their horses
or their oxen, the women are packing up their unsold goods. In every home
in the city one of the trees that scented the open air a week ago is
shining now with lights and little gilded nuts and apples, and is helping
to make that Christmas smell, all compact of the pine forest, wax |265|
candles, cakes and painted toys, you must associate so long as you live
with Christmas in Germany."{2}

Even in London one may get a glimpse of the Teutonic Christmas in the
half-German streets round Fitzroy Square. They are bald and drab enough,
but at Christmas here and there a window shines with a lighted tree, and
the very prosaic Lutheran church in Cleveland Street has an unwonted
sight to show--two great fir-trees decked with white candles, standing
one on each side of the pulpit. The church of the German Catholics, too,
St. Boniface's, Whitechapel, has in its sanctuary two Christmas-trees
strangely gay with coloured glistening balls and long strands of gold and
silver _engelshaar_. The candles are lit at Benediction during the
festival, and between the shining trees the solemn ritual is performed by
the priest and a crowd of serving boys in scarlet and white with tapers
and incense.

* * * * *

There is a pretty story about the institution of the _Weihnachtsbaum_ by
Martin Luther: how, after wandering one Christmas Eve under the clear
winter sky lit by a thousand stars, he set up for his children a tree
with countless candles, an image of the starry heaven whence Christ came
down. This, however, belongs to the region of legend; the first
historical mention of the Christmas-tree is found in the notes of a
certain Strasburg citizen of unknown name, written in the year 1605. "At
Christmas," he writes, "they set up fir-trees in the parlours