azdak

That night Mr Muller brought home a Christmas tree. Even though the Mullers were to spend Christmas Eve at Grosspapa Muller's and Christmas Day at Grosspapa Hornik's there had to be a tree in their own home. Unlike Santa Claus, Christmas trees seemed to be very important in Milwaukee. The older people were as excited as the children when Mr Muller carried in his huge fragrant bundle.

The next afternoon, which was Christmas Eve day, all of them trimmed it. They put on candles and carved wooden toys and cookies hung on ribbons, and little socks with candles in them, as well as the usual bright balls. They draped the strings of cranberries around the spiraling branches and placed a star angel on the top.

Tib and Fred were very artistic and it was a beautiful tree. They had fun trimming it too, but it seemed strange to Betsy to be hanging the Mullers' balls and angels and to think that at home a tree was being trimmed with the dear familiar ornaments... some that she and Tacy had bough on their Christmas shopping trips.

And now, with everyone safely in position, the household of Herr Doktor Fischer could march forward to the great climax of Christmas Eve. A frenzied last-minute clean-up began, the maids gliding silently up and down the already gleaming parquet with huge brushes strapped to their feet. Carpets were thumped, feather-beds beaten, and in the kitchen… But there are no words to describe what went on in a good Viennese kitchen just before Christmas in those far-off days before the First World War.

Bedtime prayers, for the children, became a laborious and time-consuming business. Vicky, obsessed by her angel, devised long entreaties for his safe conduct through the skies. The twins, on the other hand, produced an inventory which would not have disgraced the mail order catalogue of a good department store. And each and every night their mother got them out of bed again, all three, because they had forgotten to say. ‘And God bless Cousin Poldi.’

Five days before Christmas, the thing happened which meant most of all to Vicky. The tree arrived. A huge tree, all but touching the ceiling of the enormous drawing room, and: ‘It’s the best tree we’ve ever had, the most beautiful,’ said Vicky, as she had said last year and the year before and was to go on saying all her life.

She wanted presents, she wanted presents very much, but this transformation of the still, dark tree - beautiful, but just any tree - into the glittering, beckoning candlelit vision that they saw when one by one (but always children first) they filed into the room on Christmas Eve… That to her, was the wonder of wonders, the magic that Christmas was all about.

And though no one could accuse the Christ Child of having favourites or anything like that, it did seem to Vicky that when He came down to earth He did the Fischers especially proud. There never did seem to be a tree as wonderful as theirs. The things that were on it, such unbelievably delicate things, could only have been made in Heaven: tiny shimmering angels, dolls as big as a thumb, golden-petalled flowers, sweets of course -oh, every kind of sweet. And candles - perhaps a thousand candles, thought Vicky. Candles which caused her father every year to say, ‘You’ll see if the house doesn’t catch fire, you’ll see!’, and which produced also a light whose softness and radiance had no equal in the world.

The twins grew less seraphic, less placid as the tension grew. ‘Will the angel come tonight?’ demanded Tilda at her prayers.

‘No,’ said Vicky. ‘You’ve got to go to sleep for two more nights.’

The tailor lay ill for three days and nights; and then it was Christmas Eve, and very late at night. The moon climbed up over the roofs and chimneys, and looked down over the gateway into College Court. There were no lights in the windows, nor any sound in the houses; all the city of Gloucester was fast asleep under the snow. And still Simpkin wanted his mice, and he mewed as he stood beside the four-post bed. But it is in the old story that all the beasts can talk, in the night between Christmas Eve and Christmas Day in the morning (though there are very few folk that can hear them, or know what it is that they say). When the Cathedral clock struck twelve there was an answer - like an echo of the chimes - and Simpkin heard it, and came out of the tailor's door, and wandered about in the snow. From all the roofs and gables and old wooden houses in Gloucester came a thousand merry voices singing the old Christmas rhymes - all the old songs that I ever heard of and som that I don't know, like Whittington's bells. First and loudest the cocks cried out: "Dame, get up, and bake your pies!"

Posted by Fred Clark

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2025/12/19/lbcf-boutros-boutros-carpathia/

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/?p=72303

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/2025/12/19/lbcf-boutros-boutros-carpathia/

https://www.patheos.com/blogs/slacktivist/?p=72303