Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/179

 Rh picture impressed itself strongly on his mind, and when he came home, he immediately went out and cut a fir-tree in a neighbouring wood, and covering it with small candles, placed it in, the room, in order to give his little ones an idea of the nocturnal heavens, with their countless lights, from whence Jesus descended to the earth. But this legend is not yet a century old. It probably took its source from a picture by Schwerdtgeburth—"Luther taking Leave of his Family." Here the artist shows Luther's family around the Christmas-tree, but he has as little historical foundation for this as Scheffel has when he introduces a Christmas-tree into his Ekkehard in the tenth century.

In Lindenau, a suburb of Leipsic, a legend is told that the Christmas-tree was introduced there during the Thirty Years' War from Sweden. In the autumn of 1632, the battle of Lützen had been fought, in which Gustavus Adolphus, King of Sweden, had been killed. For many months, wounded soldiers of the victorious Swedish army were quartered in the neighbourhood. In Lindenau there was a Swedish officer who had been shot through the hand, and who was nursed with great kindness by the people in the Protestant village. His wound healed quickly, and at Christmas-time he was well enough to leave; but, before going back to his own country, he wanted to thank the people in some tangible way, and so he asked the clergyman to allow him to arrange a Christmas-festival as he used to know it in his own northern home. He got the permission, and there, for the first time, a fir-tree covered with lights was seen in the old church. This story, like many others, seems to have no historical foundation. It is simply a charming little legend.

The Christmas-tree is certainly not as old as one generally assumes. There are many descriptions of German Yuletide festivities during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries, in none of which it is mentioned. Some of these are very minute, and we have a right to conclude from this that, at that time, and in those places