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Updated: May 31, 2025
So, while we listen to his happy song, we can watch his busy hours, until we are acquainted with the little black-capped minister who called himself "Chick, D.D." Chick's Christmas-trees were decorated, and no house in the whole world had one lovelier that morning than the hundreds that were all about him as far as he could see.
Let us say that the conditions are: a house in the country, with some forest trees near, and a few evergreens, which are Christmas-trees all winter long, fringed with snow, glistening with ice-pendants, cheerful by day and grotesque by night; a snow-storm beginning out of a dark sky, falling in a soft profusion that fills all the air, its dazzling whiteness making a light near at hand, which is quite lost in the distant darkling spaces.
The intercourse of a mother and a son is it not often like that in a world which sends its men on the four winds, to build and fight, while the mother must stay in the old nest? Seldom at Christmas can a mother gather all her children beneath the wing of her smile. Her big boys are seven seas away, and even her girls have Christmas-trees of their own.
Up here the shops were smallish, and chiefly of the provision variety, so there was no bewildering display of gifts; but there were Christmas-trees everywhere, of all sizes. It was astonishing how many people in that neighbourhood seemed to favour the old-fashioned idea of a tree. Mr. Carter looked at them with his irritation softening.
The small Charlie Cheviot had to be carried off shrieking; Margaret Rivers was critical; even Cocksmoor was experienced in Christmas-trees; and Dickie, when placed in the best situation, and asked if such trees grew in New Zealand, made answer that he helped mamma to make one every year for the Maori children.
A great receiver of presents, also, because presents give me a very lively and special pleasure; have done so always ever since my days of Christmas-trees and birthday candles, leaving all through my life a particular permeating charm connected with certain dates and seasons, like the good, wonderful smell of old fir-needles slightly toasted, and of wax tapers recently extinguished, so that all very delightful places and moments are apt to affect me as a sort of gift-giving, what the Germans have a dear word for, beloved of children, Bescheerung.
He stood a while in the market-place, silently considering the Christmas-trees they led his thoughts back to the pasture on which he had herded the cows, and the little wood of firs.
"Do you feel as if you were thawing?" Dame Louisa asked the children after they had left the Snow Man behind. "Yes, ma'am," said they. Dame Louisa drove as fast as she could, with thankful tears running down her cheeks. "I've been a wicked, cross old woman," said she again and again, "and that is what blasted my Christmas-trees."
Visions arose of crowded streets, of shops decorated with holly and mistletoe, of churches with little candle-lit Nativities, of Christmas-trees at home laden with fairy lamps and presents, of children sitting up late to dance and laugh and then hanging up their stockings before going to bed to dream of Santa Claus, of church bells ringing for midnight mass, and, last of all, of the "waits" by the old cross in the market-place in the midst of the winter frost and snow.
"As if I were anything more than a plain every-day necessity! And not such an incapable after all, am I, Daddy?" "Not when it comes to Christmas-trees." "Daddy, see, it's beginning to snow!" "We're going to have a white Christmas, all right," the doctor said; then, as the telephone rang sharply, he went to answer it.
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