A Christmas Tree (in Christmas Short Works Collection 2008 )

MP3 Audio CD. A Christmas Tree (in Christmas Short Works Collection 2008 )

A CHRISTMAS TREE.
[1850]


I HAVE been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children
assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was
planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above
their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers;
and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were
rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real
watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being
wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished
tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other
articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at
Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some
fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more
agreeable in appearance than many real men—and no wonder, for their heads
took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles
and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes,
sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were
trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and
jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were
guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings
of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops,
needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards,
bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf;
imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short,
as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty
child, her bosom friend, &l