Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/176

 168 In the beginning of this century Christmas-trees were unknown in Sweden, in the German sense at least. It was the custom there to place fir- or pine-trees in front of the houses. So, at any rate, Finn Magnusen reports, in his Lexicon Mythologicum; and he adds, that the Danes and Norwegians did the same, but inside the house. To the insular Swedes and the Russians around the Baltic coast, in Dago and Worms, the Christmas-tree had at that time already been introduced from Germany. The fir, decorated with nuts and apples, carried five candles on each branch. On the Swedish mainland it was the custom in some places for the peasants to go to a field where a solitary tree stood, to put fire to it, and then perform a dance around it amid shouts of joy.

Everywhere where the Christmas-tree custom has been adopted we find that German emigrants, German sailors from merchant vessels, or German men-of-war, have first introduced it.

It has taken the deepest root in the United States, where there is so much of the German element. There, nobody looks upon it any more as something especially German; families of all nationalities have adopted the fairy-tree. Even the spirit of invention of the 19th century has got hold of it. Trees are made of moulded iron. Through the hollow trunk and branches gas-pipes are conducted, and instead of the modest light of the little wax candle, the glaring gas jet bursts forth from this artificial production of the ironfounder.

The Christmas-tree and German Christmas are ideas closely connected in the mind of every non-German. Most Germans feel the same. A Christmas without a tree is no real Christmas. In the lonely garret of the old maid, to whom it brings back for a moment happy childhood and hopeful youth; in the squalid cellar of the poorest workman, with his too large family, everywhere we may find, be it ever so small, a specimen of this symbol of Christmas-time. At every Christmarkt (Christmas-fair)