Page:Folk-lore - A Quarterly Review. Volume 3, 1892.djvu/181

 Rh custom in the extreme west of Germany in Alsace, perhaps only in Strasburg. The rest of the country did not know it at that time, just as little as other lands. And it seems to have taken a long time to spread. More than two hundred years elapsed before it had penetrated to all parts of the Fatherland. For nearly a century we find no record of the Yule-tree. In the year 1737 it reappears, strange to say, on the eastern frontier of Germany, near where the Slavonic element begins. In 1737, a young doctor of law, Gottfried Kissling, from Zittau, became Lecturer in Wittenberg, the famous university where Luther and Melancthon had taught. As "primitiæ academicæ", he wrote a very learned Latin dissertation, entitled About Christmas Presents. He is very wroth about all the malpractices of his native town at Christmas-time, and goes on to say: "If it is necessary that the giving of presents should be accompanied by certain ceremonies, I like the way best in which a lady who lived in the country used to arrange the matter, . . . On the evening preceding the birthday of our Lord, she placed as many small trees in her rooms as there were persons to whom she wanted to make presents. By the height, ornament, and arrangement everyone could see which tree was intended for him. As soon as the presents had been divided and arranged, and the candles lighted on the trees, all the people entered in succession, looked at the things, and took possession each of the tree and presents intended for him."

Here we find the first mention of candles on the Christmas-tree. It is strange that each person got a separate tree; nowadays there is only one tree for all.

So far these are the only records which have come to light, but after the first half of the eighteenth century the reports multiply. The Christmas-tree penetrates into literature proper. A mention of it by the author Jung Stilling, seems to show that it was familiar to him in the days of his childhood. He was born in 1740, in Grund, in Nassau, and probably it must have been the custom there