Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York
THE CHRISTMAS TREE MARKET IN NEW YORK
Breaking the Piñate
If you were in Mexico the week before Christmas you would not find one Christmas tree, unless it were in some town where Americans have been living for a good while. But everywhere children would be talking about breaking a piñate (pronounced pin-yah-tay) as you talk of having a tree. In the small stalls set up in the plazas for the sale of Christmas gifts there are hundreds of different gayly colored piñates. Some are bowl-shaped or oval jars made out of the coarse red earthenware of Puebla, painted with dashes of yellow and black in patterns that have been copied from old Indian pottery. Others are made of paper in gay stripes of red and yellow, in shape like tissue-paper balloons, and are decorated with tinsel ornaments and streamers of bright-colored paper, such as are hung on Christmas trees. Others still are made in the shape of grotesque figures, clowns with baggy trousers, dancing girls in wide-spread skirts, monks in long cloaks, and animals. All of them, jars or paper figures, are easily breakable; they are stuffed with sweets, crackers, rattles, whistles, or any other toys which are small and light, and parents hang them—usually on Christmas Eve—from the ceiling of a room or from a branch of a tree in the courtyard. Each child of the family in turn after being blindfolded, given a long stick, and led some distance away from the hanging piñate, is allowed to grope toward where he thinks it is and to strike out at it three times in the effort to break it. If he fails, another is given the chance. Mexican families are large and often a father and all his sons live together in square, flat-roofed buildings of sun-dried brick around a common courtyard. So there is a deal of laughter and excitement as one child after another makes his trial. At last one manages to hit the piñate so that it breaks open and toys, sweets, and ornaments come down in a shower. This is the moment for which the children crowding around have been waiting, and they swoop down upon the dainties in a joyous scramble. The successful child usually receives a special prize; for, blindfolded as he is, he stands small chance of getting anything else.
Breaking the piñate usually follows a curious ceremony in which all those present walk together around the house several times chanting a litany. The procession is in memory of the night when Joseph and Mary journeyed to Bethlehem and found no room in the inn. Often even the donkey belonging to the family is brought into the ceremony. After the litany some go within the house while others outside sing a plea for admittance, which is at first roughly refused. Finally they are admitted, and another hymn is followed by feasting and merry-making, of which breaking the piñate is the children’s part.
Christmas upon a Greenland Iceberg
One hot June day in 1869 there was a great stir in the new harbor of Bremerhaven in Germany; at its entrance lay two stout ships, the Germania and the Hansa, fully fitted out for Arctic exploration. Visitors and messengers were going back and forth. The King of Prussia himself, with many of his nobles, the Grand Duke of Mecklenburg, Schwerin, Count Bismarck, and General von Moltke among them, had come from Berlin to say Godspeed to the commander and the scientific gentlemen who were braving unknown dangers, and certain privations and hardships “for the honor of the German navy and of German science,” as his Majesty expressed it.
The last of the cases of stores hoisted on board the Hansa were stowed away with a peculiar laughing tenderness. They were stout chests cased in lead in which friends of these explorers had placed such friendly little trifles as are inseparable from the celebration of Christmas wherever the Germans may be.