[Illustration: THE CHRISTMAS SHEAF.]
I do not know how the forty years I have been away have dealt with
“Jule-nissen,” the Christmas elf of my childhood. He was pretty old
then, gray and bent, and there were signs that his time was nearly
over. So it may be that they have laid him away. I shall find out when
I go over there next time. When I was a boy we never sat down to our
Christmas Eve dinner until a bowl of rice and milk had been taken up
to the attic, where he lived with the marten and its young, and kept an
eye upon the house--saw that everything ran smoothly. I never met him
myself, but I know the house-cat must have done so. No doubt they were
well acquainted; for when in the morning I went in for the bowl, there
it was, quite dry and licked clean, and the cat purring in the corner.
So, being there all night, he must have seen and likely talked with him.
I suspect, as I said, that they have not treated my Nisse fairly in
these matter-of-fact days that have come upon us, not altogether for
our own good, I fear. I am not even certain that they were quite
serious about him then, though to my mind that was very unreasonable.
But then there is nothing so unreasonable to a child as the cold reason
of the grown-ups. However, if they have gone back on him, I know where
to find him yet. Only last Christmas when I talked of him to the
tenement-house mothers in my Henry Street Neighborhood House,[6]--all
of them from the ever faithful isle,--I saw their eyes light up with
the glad smile of recognition, and half a dozen called out excitedly,
“The Little People! the Leprecawn ye mean, we know him well,” and they
were not more pleased than I to find that we had an old friend in
common. For the Nisse, or the Leprecawn, call him whichever you like,
was a friend indeed to those who loved kindness and peace. If there
was a house in which contention ruled, either he would have nothing
to do with it, like the stork that built its nest on the roof, or
else he paid the tenants back in their own coin, playing all kinds of
tricks upon them and making it very uncomfortable. I suppose it was
this trait that gave people, when they began to reason so much about
things, the notion that he was really the wraith, as it were, of their
own disposition, which was not so at all. I remember the story told of
one man who quarrelled with everybody, and in consequence had a very
troublesome Nisse in the house that provoked him to the point of moving
away; which he did. But as the load of furniture was going down the
street, with its owner hugging himself in glee at the thought that
he had stolen a march on the Nisse, the little fellow poked his head
out of the load and nodded to him, “We are moving to-day.” At which
naturally he flew into a great rage. But then, that was just a story.
[Illustration: THE NISSE.]
The Nisse was of the family, as you see, very much of it, and certainly
not to be classed with the cattle. Yet they were his special concern;
he kept them quiet, and saw to it, when the stableman forgot, that
they were properly bedded and cleaned and fed. He was very well known
to the hands about the farm, and they said that he looked just like a
little old man, all in gray and with a pointed red nightcap and long
gray beard. He was always civilly treated, as he surely deserved to
be, but Christmas was his great holiday, when he became part of it,
indeed, and was made much of. So, for that matter, was everything that
lived under the husbandman’s roof, or within reach of it. The farmer
always set a lighted candle in his window on Christmas Eve, to guide
the lonesome wanderer to a hospitable hearth. The very sparrows that
burrowed in the straw thatch, and did it no good, were not forgotten. A
sheaf of rye was set out in the snow for them, so that on that night at
least they should have shelter and warmth unchallenged, and plenty to
eat. At all other times we were permitted to raid their nests and help
ourselves to a sparrow roast, which was by long odds the greatest treat
we had. Thirty or forty of them, dug out of any old thatch roof by
the light of the stable lantern and stuffed into Ane’s long stocking,
which we had borrowed for a game-bag, made a meal for the whole family,
each sparrow a fat mouthful. Ane was the cook, and I am very certain
that her pot-roast of sparrow would pass muster at any Fifth Avenue
restaurant as the finest dish of reed-birds that ever was. However,
at Christmas their sheaf was their sanctuary, and no one as much as
squinted at them. Only last winter when Christmas found me stranded in
a little Michigan town, wandering disconsolate about the streets, I
came across such a sheaf raised on a pole in a dooryard, and I knew at
once that one of my people lived in that house and kept Yule in the
old way. So I felt as if I were not quite a stranger.
All the animals knew perfectly well that the holiday had come, and kept
it in their way. The watch-dog was unchained. In the midnight hour
on the Holy Eve the cattle stood up in their stalls and bowed out of
respect and reverence for Him who was laid in a manger when there was
no room in the inn, and in that hour speech was given them, and they
talked together. Claus, our neighbor’s man, had seen and heard it, and
every Christmas Eve I meant fully to go and be there when it happened;
but always long before that I had been led away to bed, a very sleepy
boy, with all my toys hugged tight, and when I woke up the daylight
shone through the frosted window-panes, and they were blowing good
morning from the church tower; it would be a whole year before another
Christmas. So I vowed, with a sigh at having neglected a really sacred
observance, that I would be there sure on the next Christmas Eve. But
it was always so, every year, and perhaps it was just as well, for
Claus said that it might go ill with the one who listened, if the cows
found him out.
Blowing in the Yule from the grim old tower that had stood eight
hundred years against the blasts of the North Sea was one of the
customs of the Old Town that abide, however it fares with the Nisse;
that I know. At sun-up, while yet the people were at breakfast, the
town band climbed the many steep ladders to the top of the tower, and
up there, in fair weather or foul,--and sometimes it blew great guns
from the wintry sea,--they played four old hymns, one to each corner
of the compass, so that no one was forgotten. They always began with
Luther’s sturdy challenge, “A Mighty Fortress is Our God,” while
down below we listened devoutly. There was something both weird and
beautiful about those far-away strains in the early morning light of
the northern winter, something that was not of earth and that suggested
to my child’s imagination the angels’ song on far Judean hills. Even
now, after all these years, the memory of it does that. It could not
have been because the music was so rare, for the band was made up
of small storekeepers and artisans who thus turned an honest penny
on festive occasions. Incongruously enough, I think, the official
town mourner who bade people to funerals was one of them. It was like
the burghers’ guard, the colonel of which--we thought him at least a
general, because of the huge brass sword he trailed when he marched at
the head of his men--was the town tailor, a very small but very martial
man. But whether or no, it was beautiful. I have never heard music
since that so moved me. When the last strain died away came the big
bells with their deep voices that sang far out over field and heath,
and our Yule was fairly under way.
[Illustration: “BLOWING IN YULE FROM THE GRIM OLD TOWER.”]
A whole fortnight we kept it. Real Christmas was from Little Christmas
Eve, which was the night before the Holy Eve proper, till New Year.
Then there was a week of supplementary festivities before things
slipped back into their wonted groove. That was the time of parties
and balls. The great ball of the year was on the day after Christmas.
Second Christmas Day we called it, when all the quality attended at
the club-house, where the Amtmand and the Burgomaster, the Bishop and
the Rector of the Latin School, did the honors and received the people.
That was the grandest of the town functions. The school ball, late
in autumn, was the jolliest, for then the boys invited each the girl
he liked best, and the older people were guests and outsiders, so to
speak. The Latin School, still the “Cathedral School,” was as old as
the Domkirke itself, and when it took the stage it was easily first
while it lasted. The Yule ball, though it was a rather more formal
affair, for all that was neither stiff nor tiresome; nothing was in the
Old Town; there was too much genuine kindness for that. And then it was
the recognized occasion when matches were made by enterprising mammas,
or by the young themselves, and when engagements were declared and
discussed as the great news of the day. We heard of all those things
afterward and thought a great fuss was being made over nothing much.
For when a young couple were declared engaged, that meant that there
was no more fun to be got out of them. They were given, after that, to
go mooning about by themselves and to chasing us children away when
we ran across them; until they happily returned to their senses, got
married, and became reasonable human beings once more.
When we had been sent to bed on the great night, Father and Mother went
away in their Sunday very best, and we knew they would not return until
two o’clock in the morning, a fact which alone invested the occasion
with unwonted gravity, for the Old Town kept early hours. At ten
o’clock, when the watchman droned his sleepy lay, absurdly warning the
people to
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
spiced cake-dough we played cards for and stuffed our pockets with,
gnawing 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 paid forfeits with them in
the game of scratch-nose (jackstraws), when the fellow fishing for his
straw stirred the others and had his nose scratched with the little
file in the bunch as extra penalty; in “Under which tree lies my pig?”
in which the pig was a pepper-nut, the fingers of the closed hands
the trees; and in Black Peter. In this last the loser had his nose
blackened with the snuff from the candle until advancing civilization
substituted a burnt cork. Christmas without pepper-nuts would have
been a hollow mockery indeed. 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.
It all stood for the universal desire that in the joyous season
everybody be made glad. I know that in the Old Town no one went hungry
or cold during the holidays, if indeed any one ever did. Every one gave
of what he had, and no one was afraid of pauperizing anybody by his
gifts, for they were given gladly and in love, and that makes all the
difference--did then and does now. At Christmas it is perfectly safe to
let our scientific principles go and just remember the Lord’s command
that we love one another. I subscribe to them all with perfect loyalty,
and try to practise them till Christmas week comes in with its holly
and the smell of balsam and fir, and the memories of childhood in the
Old Town; then--well, anyway, it is only a little while. New Year and
the long cold winter come soon enough.
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
dreamily 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
grave-stones 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.
[Illustration: “THE WHOLE FAMILY TURNED TO AND HELPED.”]
At home the great dinner of the year was waiting for us: roast goose
stuffed with apples and prunes, rice pudding with cinnamon and sugar
on it, and a great staring butter eye in the middle. The pudding was
to lay the ground-work with, and it was served in deep soup-plates. It
was the dish the Nisse came in on, and the cat. On New Year’s Eve both
these were left out; but to make up for it an almond was slipped into
the “gröd,” and whoever found it in his plate got a present. It was no
device to make people “fletch,” but it served the purpose admirably.
At Christmas we had doughnuts after the goose, big and stout and
good. However I managed it, I don’t know, but it is a tradition in the
family, and I remember it well, that I once ate thirteen on top of the
big dinner. Evidently I was having a good time. Dinner was, if not the
chief end of man, at least an item in his make-up, and a big one.[7]
When it had had time to settle and all the kitchen work was done,
Father took his seat at the end of the long table, with all the
household gathered about, the servants included and the baby without
fail, and read the story of The Child: “And it came to pass in those
days,” while Mother hushed the baby. Then we sang together “A Child is
Born in Bethlehem,” which was the simplest of our hymns, and also the
one we children loved best, for it told of how in heaven we were to
walk to church
On sky-blue carpets, star-bedeckt,
which was a great comfort. Children love beautiful things, and we had
few of them. The great and precious treasure in our house was the rag
carpet in the spare room which we were allowed to enter only on festive
occasions such as Christmas. It had an orange streak in it which I can
see to this day. Whenever I come across one that even remotely suggests
it, it gives me yet a kind of solemn feeling. We had no piano,--that
was a luxury in those days,--and Father was not a singer, but he led
on bravely with his tremulous bass and we all joined in, Ane the cook
and Maria the housemaid furtively wiping their eyes with their aprons,
for they were good and pious folk and this was their Christmas service.
So we sang the ten verses to end, with their refrain “Hallelujah!
hallelujah,” that always seemed to me to open the very gates of Yule.
And it did, literally; for when the last hallelujah died away the
door of the spare room was flung wide and there stood the Christmas
tree, all shining lights, and the baby was borne in, wide-eyed, to
be the first, as was proper; for was not this The Child’s holiday?
Unconsciously we all gave way to those who were nearest Him, who had
most recently come from His presence and were therefore in closest
touch with the spirit of the holiday. So, when we joined hands and
danced around the tree, Father held the baby, and we laughed and were
happy as the little one crowed his joy and stretched the tiny arms
toward the light.
[Illustration: “WE JOINED HANDS AND DANCED AROUND THE TREE.”]
Light and shadow, joy and sorrow, go hand in hand in the world. While
we danced and made merry, there was one near for whom Christmas was but
grief and loss. Out in the white fields he went from farm to farm, a
solitary wanderer, the folklore had it, looking for plough or harrow
on which to rest his weary limbs. It was the Wandering Jew, to whom
this hope was given, that, if on that night of all in the year he could
find some tool used in honest toil over which the sign of the cross had
not been made, his wanderings would be at an end and the curse depart
from him, to cleave thenceforward to the luckless farmer.[8] He never
found what he sought in my time. The thrifty husbandman had been over
his field on the eve of the holiday with a watchful eye to his coming.
When the bell in the distant church tower struck the midnight hour,
belated travellers heard his sorrowful wail as he fled over the heath
and vanished.
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. Perhaps that
is a good reason why there clings about the Christmas tree in my old
home that which has preserved it from being swept along in the flood
of senseless luxury that has swamped so many things in our money-mad
day. At least so it was then. Every time I see a tree studded with
electric lights, garlands of tinsel-gold festooning every branch, and
hung with the hundred costly knicknacks the storekeepers invent year
by year “to make trade,” until the tree itself disappears entirely
under its burden, I have a feeling what a fraud has been practised on
the kindly spirit of Yule. 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 names
were 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.
Mistletoe was rare in Denmark. There was known to be but one oak in
all the land on which it grew. But that did not discourage the young.
We had our kissing games which gave the boys and girls their chance to
choose sides, and in the Christmas season they went on right merrily.
There was rarely a night that did not bring the children together under
some roof or other. They say that kissing goes by favor, but we had not
arrived at that point yet, though we had our preferences. In the game
of Post Office, for instance, he was a bold boy who would dare call out
the girl he really liked, to get the letter that was supposed to be
awaiting her. You could tell for a dead certainty who was his choice
by watching whom he studiously avoided asking for. I have a very vivid
recollection of having once really dared with sudden desperation, and
of the defiant flushed face, framed in angry curls, that confronted me
in the hall, the painful silence while we each stood looking the other
way and heard our playmates tittering behind the closed door,--for well
they knew,--and her indignant stride as she went back to her seat
unkissed, with me trailing behind, feeling like a very sheepish boy,
and no doubt looking the part.
[Illustration: “WE ‘SMASHED’ THE NEW YEAR IN.”]
The Old Year went out with much such a racket as we make nowadays,
but of quite a different kind. We did not blow the New Year in, we
“smashed” it in. When it was dark on New Year’s Eve, we stole out with
all the cracked and damaged crockery of the year that had been hoarded
for the purpose and, hieing ourselves to some favorite neighbor’s door,
broke our pots against it. Then we ran, but not very far or very fast,
for it was part of the game that if one was caught at it, he was to
be taken in and treated to hot doughnuts. The smashing was a mark of
favor, and the citizen who had most pots broken against his door was
the most popular man in town. When I was in the Latin School, a cranky
burgomaster, whose door had been freshly painted, gave orders to the
watchmen to stop it and gave them an unhappy night, for they were hard
put to it to find a way it was safe to look, with the streets full of
the best citizens in town, and their wives and daughters, sneaking
singly by with bulging coats on their way to salute a friend. That was
when our mothers--those who were not out smashing in New Year--came
out strong, after the fashion of mothers. They baked more doughnuts
than ever that night, and beckoned the watchman in to the treat; and
there he sat, blissfully deaf while the street rang with the thunderous
salvos of our raids; until it was discovered that the burgomaster
himself was on patrol, when there was a sudden rush from kitchen doors
and a great scurrying through streets that grew strangely silent.
The town had its revenge, however. The burgomaster, returning home in
the midnight hour, stumbled in his gate over a discarded Christmas
tree hung full of old boots and many black and sooty pots that went
down around him with great smash in the upset, so that his family came
running out in alarm to find him sprawling in the midst of the biggest
celebration of all. His dignity suffered a shock which he never got
over quite. But it killed the New Year’s fun, too. For he was really
a good fellow, and then he was the burgomaster, and chief of police to
boot. I suspect the fact was that the pot smashing had run its course.
Perhaps the supply of pots was giving out; we began to use tinware more
about that time. That was the end of it, anyhow.
[Illustration: “WE CAUGHT THEM NAPPING THERE ONE DARK NIGHT.”]
We boys got square, too, with the watchmen. We knew their habit
of stowing themselves away in the stage-coach that stood in the
market-place when they had cried the hour at ten o’clock, and we caught
them napping there one dark night when we were coming home from a
party. The stage had doors that locked on the outside. We slammed them
shut and ran the conveyance, with them in it wildly gesticulating from
the windows, through the main street of the town, amid the cheers of
the citizens whom the racket aroused from their slumbers. We were safe
enough. The watchmen were not anxious to catch us, maddened as they
were by our prank, and they were careful not to report us either. I
chuckled at that exploit more than once when, in years long after, I
went the rounds of the midnight streets with Haroun-al-Roosevelt,
as they called New York’s Police Commissioner, to find his patrolmen
sleeping soundly on their posts when they should have been catching
thieves. Human nature, police human nature, anyhow, is not so
different, after all, in the old world and in the new.
With Twelfth Night our Yule came to an end. In that night, if a girl
would know her fate, she must go to bed walking backward and throw a
shoe over her left shoulder, or hide it under her pillow, I forget
which, perhaps both, and say aloud a verse that prayed the Three Holy
Kings to show her the man
Whose table I must set,
Whose bed I must spread,
Whose name I must bear,
Whose bride I must be.
The man who appeared to her in her sleep was to be her husband. There
was no escape from it, and consequently she did not try. He was her
Christmas gift, and she took him for better or for worse. Let us hope
that the Nisse played her no scurvy trick, and that it was for better
always.