Some Christmas Stories | Page 3

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This etext was prepared from the 1911 Chapman and Hall Christmas
Stories (Volume 1) edition by David Price, email
[email protected]

Some Short Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens

Contents:
A Christmas Tree What Christmas is as we Grow Older The Poor
Relation's Story The Child's Story The Schoolboy's Story Nobody's
Story

A CHRISTMAS TREE

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,

"There was everything, and more." This motley collection of odd
objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back the
bright looks directed towards it from every side--some of the
diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and a
few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers,
aunts, and nurses--made a lively realisation of the fancies of childhood;
and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that
come into existence on the earth, have their wild adornments at that
well-remembered time.
Being now at home again, and alone, the only person in the house
awake, my thoughts are drawn back, by a fascination which I do not
care to resist, to my own childhood. I begin to consider, what do we all
remember best upon the branches of the Christmas Tree of our own
young Christmas days, by which we climbed to real life.
Straight, in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its
growth by no encircling walls or soon-reached ceiling, a shadowy tree
arises; and, looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top-- for I
observe in this tree the singular property that it appears to grow
downward towards the earth--I look into my youngest Christmas
recollections!
All toys at first, I find. Up yonder, among the green holly and red
berries, is the Tumbler with his hands in his pockets, who wouldn't lie
down, but whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his
fat body about, until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster
eyes of his to bear upon me--when I affected to laugh very much, but in
my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him. Close beside him