No, I don’t believe in you any more, but you may leave the things.
Drawing by J. R. Shaver.
Copyright 1908 by Life Publishing Co.
A great hush falls upon the assembled children as the Saint advances into the room. One by one he calls them up to examine them. Simple questions suited to their various ages are put to them by the bishop, after which each has to repeat a hymn or a prayer. All this part of the evening’s business is carried on with the greatest seriousness and decorum on the part of children and grown-ups alike.
If the child passes a satisfactory examination the angels present it with nuts and apples—if not it has to stand aside. When the last of the examinations is over, the devils are admitted into the room.
They are not allowed to come near the good children, but they may tease and frighten the naughty little boys and girls as much as they choose. They delight in strange dances, and in all sorts of odd antics, such as smearing the girls’ faces with lamp-black, or putting coal dust and ashes down the backs of the boys.
When Saint Nicholas has left, the children return to their own homes. Before going to bed they hang up their stockings by the chimney or, more likely, place their little boots and shoes close to the hearth, expecting to find them filled with gifts in the morning.
Boots and shoes indeed, came before stockings almost everywhere, the advantages of clean stockings as receivers for candies and other eatables being a comparatively new discovery. In Belgium to this day the children give their shoes an extra fine polish on Christmas Eve, fill them with hay, oats, carrots, for Santa Klaus’s white horse, and put them on the table, or set them in the fireplace. The room is then carefully closed and the door is locked.
In the morning a strange thing is found to have happened! The furniture is all turned topsy-turvy, the fodder has been removed from the shoes and in its place the good little children find all sorts of nice things and the bad ones only rods of birch and bits of coal.
Boots and shoes are also in use in many parts of France. But here, as a general rule, it is the good little Jesus (le bon petit Jesus) who comes down the chimney to fill all this footgear with sweetmeats. Formerly this custom extended to Paris. A French journalist named Charton thus describes the sights that met his eye on Christmas eve in Paris in the middle of the nineteenth century:
