"Be quick and bright,
Watch fire and light,
Our clock it has struck ten,"
it was ordinarily tucked in and asleep. But that night we lay awake a long time listening to the muffled sound of heavy wheels in the snow, rolling unceasingly past, and trying to picture to ourselves the grandeur they conveyed. Every carriage in the town was then in use and doing overtime. I think there were as many as four.
When we were not dancing or playing games, we literally ate our way through the two holiday weeks. Pastry by the mile did we eat, and general indigestion brooded over the town when it emerged into the white light of the new year. At any rate, it ought to have done so. It is a prime article of faith with the Danes to this day that for any one to go out of a friend's house, or of anybody's house, in the Christmas season without partaking of its cheer, is to "bear away their Yule," which no one must do on any account. Every house was a bakery from the middle of December until Christmas Eve, and, oh! the quantities of cakes we ate, and such cakes! We were sixteen normally in our home, and mother mixed the dough for her cakes in a veritable horse trough kept for that exclusive purpose. As much as a sack of flour went in, I guess, and gallons of molasses, and whatever else went to the mixing. For weeks there had been long and anxious speculations as to "what father would do," and gloomy conferences between him and mother over the state of the family pocketbook, which was never plethoric; but at last the joyful message ran through the house from attic to kitchen that the appropriation had been made, "even for citron," which meant throwing all care to the winds. The thrill of it, when we children stood by and saw the generous avalanche going into the trough! What would not come out of it! The whole family turned to and helped make the cakes and cut the "pepper nuts," which were little squares of cake dough we played cards for and stuffed our pockets with, gnashing them incessantly. Talk about eating between meals: ours was a continuous performance for two solid weeks.
The pepper nuts were the real staple of Christmas to us children. We rolled the dough in long strings like slender eels and then cut it a little on the bias. They were good, those nuts, when baked brown. I wish I had some now.
Christmas Eve was, of course, the great and blessed time. That was the one night in the year when in the gray old Domkirke services were held by candle-light.
A myriad wax candles twinkled in the gloom, but did not dispel it. It lingered under the great arches where the voice of the venerable minister, the responses of the congregation, and above it all the boyish treble of the choir, billowed and strove, now dreamingly with the memories of ages past, now sharply, tossed from angle to corner in the stone walls, and again in long thunderous echoes sweeping all before it on the triumphant strains of the organ, like a victorious army with banners crowding through the halls of time. So it sounded to me as sleep gently tugged at my eyelids. The air grew heavy with the smell of evergreens and of burning wax, and as the thunder of war drew farther and farther away, in the shadow of the great pillars stirred the phantoms of mailed knights whose names were hewn in the gravestones there. We youngsters clung to the skirts of mother as we went out and the great doors fell to behind us. And yet those Christmas eves, with mother's gentle eyes forever inseparable from them, and with the glad cries of "Merry Christmas!" ringing all about, have left a touch of sweet peace in my heart which all the years have not effaced, nor ever will....
When Ansgarius preached the White Christ to the vikings of the North, so runs the legend of the Christmas-tree, the Lord sent his three messengers, Faith, Hope, and Love, to help light the first tree. Seeking one that should be high as hope, wide as love, and that bore the sign of the cross on every bough, they chose the balsam fir, which best of all the trees in the forest met the requirements.... Wax candles are the only real thing for a Christmas-tree, candles of wax that mingle their perfume with that of the burning fir, not the by-product of some coal-oil or other abomination. What if the boughs do catch fire? They can be watched, and too many candles are tawdry, anyhow. Also, red apples, oranges, and old-fashioned cornucopias made of colored paper, and made at home, look a hundred times better and fitter in the green; and so do drums and toy trumpets and wald-horns, and a rocking-horse reined up in front that need not have cost forty dollars, or anything like it.
I am thinking of one, or rather two, a little piebald team with a wooden seat between, for which mother certainly did not give over seventy-five cents at the store, that as "Belcher and Mamie"—the name was bestowed on the beasts at sight by Kate, aged three, who bossed the play-room—gave a generation of romping children more happiness than all the expensive railroads and trolley-cars and steam engines that are considered indispensable to keeping Christmas nowadays. And the Noah's Ark with Noah and his wife and all the animals that went two by two—ah, well, I haven't set out to preach a sermon on extravagance that makes no one happier, but I wish—The legend makes me think of the holly that grew in our Danish woods. We called it "Christ-thorn," for to us it was of that the crown of thorns was made with which the cruel soldiers mocked our Saviour, and the red berries were the drops of blood that fell from his anguished brow. Therefore the holly was a sacred tree, and to this day the woods in which I find it seem to me like the forest where the Christmas roses bloomed in the night when the Lord was born, different from all other woods, and better.