Chapter IV: Part 4

They say that all this happened early in December, and in some countries December 6 is the great day for the children. In Holland, on St. Nicholas Eve, December 5, the children go out with their parents to see the brilliantly decorated shops, and in the doorways of many of them stands the saint, gorgeously dressed and handing to every child who passes a tiny toy or a sweet. No wonder the good saint must needs go to the seashore for a day before his next heavy job of being Santa Claus to all America on the twenty-fifth,—to say nothing of merry England!

At any rate, we find that in a certain seaport of southern Italy it is the sailors’ custom on December 6 to take the image of the saint from the beautiful church of St. Nicholas and, with a long procession of boats, carry it far out to sea. Toward nightfall they return and in the glory of the gold and crimson sunset are met on landing by all the townspeople. Hundreds of quaintly dressed pilgrims from the country round join the crowd that welcomes the home-coming saint with songs, bonfires, and torches, and brings him back to his own place.

_Copyright by Underwood & Underwood, New York_

AN AMERICAN CHRISTMAS TREE]

His next appearance is in those countries where the Greek Church is the national religion. Their Day of St. Nicholas, which is December 6 elsewhere, comes upon what we should call December 19, and the saint is supposed to bring the winter with him. On the frozen river by Peter’s city it is celebrated with a skating and sleighing carnival. Lines of track are laid down on the ice like small-sized street-car lines. Tiny cars run here and there along them, back and forth from the smooth ice-fields roped off for sleigh races or skating contests. Perhaps it was in that cold country he found the high cap, the furs, and the coat he wears for his hard work of chimney scrambling and running the reindeer express on the Christmas Eve we know.

Once more after his strenuous American holiday week is over the hard-worked saint appears again. From the little whitewashed villages of Greece north to ice-bound Archangel and east even to Vladivostok the saint swings wearily on thousands of wax-lighted Christmas trees (their Christmas Eve comes, you must remember, thirteen days after ours). But he is a sadly wasted saint by this time—a mere waxen image a few inches long—able only to dance a little at the tip of a branch of a Christmas tree, and that is all he is asked to do. But in some houses you would find him with a queer cotton tassel in the top of his cap, and what happens then is this: some boy or girl comes by, touches his cotton tassel into flame from a lighted taper, and he burns and melts and grows shorter as if he were just an ordinary wax candle until he is all gone.

But in spite of that, in the next December, when the little children in Holland beg their mothers to take them out to see the lighted shops, there he is again with his bag of sweets. And if you want to know what happens to him after that you will only have to read this story over again.

The Befana Fair in Rome

In Rome the season of making gifts corresponding to our Christmas comes twelve days later, and the gift-bringer would not be called Santa Claus or Saint Nicholas, but Befana, a gruff little old woman. Perhaps she is in some way connected with the old woman of whom the legend is told that she was sweeping out her house when the Three Kings rode by with gifts for the infant Christ. “Come,” they said, “and see the _Bambin Gesù_.” She said she would when she had finished her sweeping. But though she took her gifts and started, she was too late then, of course, so she gave the presents to good children and bits of charcoal to those who had been naughty. The name is really a short form of Epifania, the Feast of Epiphany, and it is given both to the gift-bringer and to one of the most extraordinary popular festivals ever invented to amuse children and to turn grown people into children. It is a night fair opened every Eve of Epiphany in the great square called Piazza Navona, where long, long ago one of the Roman emperors, Domitian, once had his race-course. In the days just after Christmas workmen begin to bring out from queer underground storerooms all the lumber and other material needed for setting up booths and decorating the square for the Befana. From year to year it lies somewhere, ready for use at a moment’s notice, and when needed it is suddenly produced without confusion, marked and numbered, all ready to be put together and regilded, or repainted, or hung with acres of bright-colored draperies. The Romans are masters of the art of managing public displays and change the empty, windy square as if by magic suddenly into a great oval street of booths enclosing the whole circus-shaped space. At dark on the Eve of the Epiphany the Befana begins. The hundreds of booths are choked with toys, and gleam with thousands of little lights. In the open spaces the moving crowd of children, parents, and grandparents grows closer and closer between sunset and midnight, and every one is splitting the air with some sort of whistle, horn, or trumpet. Noise is the chief need of a successful Befana, and the first thing every one buys who comes must be a tin horn or one of the grotesque little figures made of painted clay, always with a whistle in some part of it. Their very ugliness is attractive, and they are daubed with a kind of bright and harmless paint of which every Roman child remembers the taste so long as he lives. Round and round the crowd moves in a stream of young, old, and middle-aged, all blowing horns and whistles with a ridiculously solemn persistency, bent on making all the noise it is possible to get out of one small toy. Now and then they stop to buy at some booth, or to greet a friend; one group attacks another with a specially strong burst of noise almost too much to stand when shrill whistles are brought close to ears, and there are shouts of laughter when the party which can make the most hideous noise drives off the other half deaf from the din.

In one long-remembered year, in the old English Protestant church about a mile away, the organ was rebuilt and the organist, a practical Anglo-Saxon, had the useless old pipes sold at the night fair for the benefit of the church. The braying of the high cracked reeds was frightful and never to be forgotten.

Thousands upon thousands of people throng the square; even under the clear winter sky it is not cold; the flaring, smoking, wind-blown torches throw strange shadows down upon the old women who behind the booths sit warming their skinny hands over earthen pots of glowing coals. They look on without a smile on their wrinkled faces while their sons and daughters sell little old women of clay, the very images of their mothers, to passing customers. And there is no confusion, no accident, no trouble, there are no drunken men and no pickpockets. But Romans are not like other people.

The Golden Carol

(Of Melchior, Balthazar, and Gaspar, the Three Kings.)

We saw the light shine out a-far,
On Christmas in the morning,
And straight we knew Christ’s Star it was,
Bright beaming in the morning.
Then did we fall on bended knee,
On Christmas in the morning,
And prais’d the Lord, who’d let us see
His glory at its dawning.

Oh! ever thought be of His Name,
On Christmas in the morning,

_Memling_

THE ADORATION OF THE MAGI]

Who bore for us both grief and shame,
Afflictions sharpest scorning.
And may we die (when death shall come),
On Christmas in the morning,
And see in heav’n, our glorious home,
The Star of Christmas morning.

Babouscka

It was the night the dear Christ Child came to Bethlehem. In a country far away from Him, an old, old woman named Babouscka sat in her snug little house by her warm fire. The wind was drifting the snow outside and howling down the chimney, but it only made Babouscka’s fire burn more brightly.

“How glad I am that I may stay indoors!” said Babouscka, holding her hands out to the bright blaze.

But suddenly she heard a loud rap at her door. She opened it, and her candle shone on three old men standing outside in the snow. Their beards were as white as the snow, and so long that they reached the ground. Their eyes shone kindly in the light of Babouscka’s candle, and their arms were full of precious things—boxes of jewels, and sweet-smelling oils, and ointments.

“We have travelled far, Babouscka,” they said, “and we stop to tell you of the Baby Prince born this night in Bethlehem. He comes to rule the world and teach all men to be loving and true. We carry Him gifts. Come with us, Babouscka!”

But Babouscka looked at the driving snow, and then inside at her cozy room and the crackling fire. “It is too late for me to go with you, good sirs,” she said, “the weather is too cold.” She went inside again and shut the door, and the old men journeyed on to Bethlehem without her. But as Babouscka sat by her fire, rocking, she began to think about the little Christ Child, for she loved all babies.

“To-morrow I will go to find Him,” she said; “to-morrow, when it is light, and I will carry Him some toys.”

So when it was morning Babouscka put on her long cloak, and took her staff, and filled her basket with the pretty things a baby would like, gold balls, and wooden toys, and strings of silver cobwebs—and she set out to find the Christ Child.

But, oh! Babouscka had forgotten to ask the three old men the road to Bethlehem, and they had travelled so far through the night that she could not overtake them. Up and down the roads she hurried, through woods and fields and towns, saying to whomsoever she met: “I go to find the Christ Child. Where does He lie? I bring some pretty toys for His sake.”

But no one could tell her the way to go, and they all said, “Farther on, Babouscka, farther on.” So she travelled on, and on, and on for years and years—but she never found the little Christ Child.

They say that old Babouscka is travelling still, looking for Him. When it comes Christmas Eve, and the children are lying fast asleep, Babouscka comes softly through the snowy fields and towns, wrapped in her long cloak and carrying her basket on her arm. With her staff she raps gently at the doors and goes inside and holds her candle close to the little children’s faces.

“Is He here?” she asks. “Is the little Christ Child here?” And then she turns sorrowfully away again, crying, “Farther on, farther on.” But before she leaves she takes a toy from her basket and lays it beside the pillow for a Christmas gift. “For His sake,” she says softly and then hurries on through the years and forever in search of the little Christ Child.

The Three Kings

If you had been a child in Provence when Mistral was a boy, you might perhaps have joined the excited party of curly-headed boys and fair-haired girls in hoods and clacking wooden shoes who went with him to meet the Three Kings, the Wise Men from the East, coming to worship the Holy Child on the night before Epiphany. Mistral told of it long afterwards in this way:—

With hearts beating and eyes bright we started forth on the road to Arles, bearing our gifts of welcome, cakes for the Kings, figs for the boy pages, sweet hay for the tired camels. The wind blew cold, the robin and wren hopped shivering in the branches of the leafless trees. The fields were empty except for perhaps an old woman picking up sticks, or a ragged snail-gatherer under the hedge.

“Where are you going so late, my little ones?” some one would ask.

“We go to meet the Kings,” we said, singing and laughing, sliding and running along the white, wind-swept road. But the daylight faded, the black, pointed cypress trees hid the bell-tower of Maillane, and the long, white road stretched away empty.... Then we met a shepherd, his long, brown cloak held tight around him.

“Have you seen the Kings? Are they still a long way off?”

“Ah! the Kings! You should see them soon. They are not so far away.”

Then we set off running again, with our gifts for the Kings and the pages, and handfuls of hay for the camels. The bravest of us flagged a little as a great cloud over the mountain hid the sun, when suddenly a flash of golden splendor and a glory of yellow and crimson shone just where the white road curved from behind the mountain.

“The Kings! The Kings! See their mantles! See the banners! They are coming.”

And so we stood amazed; but instead of growing brighter as if the Kings were coming nearer, the glory faded with the sunset and we found ourselves alone in the dark highway.

“Which way did the Kings go?”

“They have gone behind the mountain.”

_Bouguereau_

ADORATION OF THE SHEPHERDS]

The white owls hooted, the wind was chill, and night-shadows frightened us; so close together with backward glances we hurried toward the village again. The hay we threw away, but the cakes we had brought to give the Kings and the figs for the boy pages—they were comforting. And at home our mothers asked us: “Well, did you see them?”

“Only a long way off. They went behind the mountain.”

“But what road did you take?”

“The road to Arles.”

“Ah, my poor lambs—but the Kings never come by that road. They come from the East—you should have taken the Roman road. Ah, the beautiful sight when they entered Maillane! the banners and trumpets! the pages leading the camels! But what a show! Now they are gone to the church to offer their adoration. After supper you shall go and see them.”

Suppers were swallowed quickly, mine at my grandmother’s, and then we all ran to the church. Sure enough, high above the manger hung the glittering star, and on bended knees before the Holy Child were the Three Kings—Gaspar, in a crimson cloak, with gifts of gold; Melchior, in yellow, offering incense; and Balthasar, in a mantle blue, presenting a vase of myrrh. How reverently we admired the gayly dressed pages who carried the Kings’ long trains, and the great camels whose heads and humps rose high above St. Joseph’s ass and the oxen!...

Many a time since those days I have been on the Arles road at this season when the robin and wren haunt the hawthorne hedges. The snail-gatherer still searches under the hedge and the owls hoot in the winter evening. But I see no more in the glory of the sunset clouds the banners of the Kings.

“Which way did they go, the Kings?”

“Behind the mountain.”

Christmas Peace

That sweetly prophetic evening silence, before the great feast of Good-Will, does not come over everything each year, even in a lonely cottage on an abandoned farm in Connecticut, than which you cannot possibly imagine anything more silent or more remote from the noise of the world. Sometimes it rains in torrents just on that night, sometimes it blows a raging gale that twists the leafless birches and elms and hickory trees like dry grass and bends the dark firs and spruces as if they were feathers, and you can hardly be heard unless you shout, for the howling and screaming and whistling of the blast.

But now and then, once in four or five years perhaps, the feathery snow lies a foot deep, fresh-fallen, on the still country side and in the woods; and the waxing moon sheds her large light on all, and Nature holds her breath to wait for the happy day and tries to sleep, but cannot from sheer happiness and peace. Indoors, the fire is glowing on the wide hearth, a great bed of coals that will last all night and be enough, because it is not bitter weather, but only cold and clear and still, as it should be; or if there is only a poor stove, the iron door is open and a comfortable, cheery red light shines out from within upon the battered iron plate and the wooden floor beyond; and the older people sit around it, not saying much, and thinking with their hearts rather than with their heads; but small boys and girls know that interesting things have been happening in the kitchen all the afternoon, and are rather glad that the supper was not very good, because there will be more room for good things to-morrow; and the grown-ups and the children have made up any little differences of opinion they may have had before supper time, because Good-Will must reign, and reign alone, like Alexander; so that there is nothing at all to regret, and nothing hurts anybody any more, and they are all happy in just waiting for King Christmas to open the door softly and make them all great people in his kingdom. But if it is the right sort of house, he is already looking in through the window, to be sure that every one is all ready for him, and that nothing has been forgotten.

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Transcriber’s Notes

pg 58 Changed: a deal of laughter and excitment
to: a deal of laughter and excitement

pg 109 Changed: were the Three Kings—Gaspard
to: were the Three Kings—Gaspar