FullReads

My mother was always very kind about making Christmas come just as soon as it could. There wasn’t much daylight. Not in December. Not in the North. Not where we lived. Except for the snow, each day was like a little jet-black jewel-box with a single gold coin in the center. The gold coin in the center was noon. It was very bright. It was really the only bright light in the day. We spent it for Christmas. Every minute of it. We popped corn and strung it into lovely loops. We threaded cranberries. We stuffed three Yule logs with crackly cones and colored fires. We made little candies. All round the edges of the bright noon-time, of course, there was morning and night. And lamplight. It wasn’t convenient to burn a great many lamps. At night father and mother sat in the lamplight and taught us our lessons. Or read stories to us. We children sat in the shadows and stared into the light. The light made us blink. The tame crow and the tame coon sat in the shadows with us. We played we were all jungle-animals together waiting outside a man’s camp to be Christianized. It was pleasant. Mother read to us about a woman who didn’t like Christmas specially. She was going to petition Congress to have the Christ Child born in leap-year so that Christmas couldn’t come oftener than once in four years. It worried us a little. Father laughed. Mother had only one worry in the world. She had it every year.

“Oh, my darling, darling Winter garden!” worried my mother. “Wouldn’t it be awful if I ever had to die just as my best Christmas tree was coming into bloom?”

It frightened us a little. But not too much. Father had the same worry every Spring about his Spring garden. Every Maytime when the tulip-buds were so fat and tight you could fairly hear them splitting, father worried.

“Oh, wouldn’t it be perfectly terrible if I should die before I find out whether those new ‘Rembrandts’ are everything that the catalogue promised? Or whether the ‘Bizards’ are really finer than the ‘Byblooms’? Now, if it was in phlox-time,” worried my father. “Especially if the phlox turned out magenta, one could slip away with scarcely a pang. But in tulip-time—-?”

We promised our mother she should never die at Christmas-time. We promised our father he should never die at tulip-time. We brought them rubbers. And kneeling-cushions. We carried their coats. We found their trowels. We kept them just as well as we could.

But, most of all, of course, we were busy wondering about our presents.

It hurries Christmas a lot to have a Christmas tree growing in your parlor for a whole month. Even if the parlor door is locked.

Lots of children have a Christmas tree for a whole month. But it’s a going tree. Its going is very sad. Just one little wee day of perfect splendor it has. And then it begins to die. Every day it dies more. It tarnishes. Its presents are all gathered. Its pop-corn gets stale. The cranberries smell. It looks scragglier and scragglier. It gets brittle. Its needles begin to fall. Pretty soon it’s nothing but a clutter. It must be dreadful to start as a Christmas tree and end by being nothing but a clutter.

But mother’s Christmas tree is a coming tree. Every day for a month it’s growing beautifuler and beautifuler! The parlor is cool. It lives in a nice box of earth. It has water every day like a dog. It never dies. It just disappears. When we come down to breakfast the day after Christmas it simply isn’t there. That’s all. It’s immortal. Always when you remember it, it’s absolutely perfect.

We liked very much to see the Christmas tree come. Every Sunday afternoon my mother unlocked the parlor door. We were not allowed to go in. But we could peep all we wanted to. It made your heart crinkle up like a handful of tinsel to watch the tin-foil buds change into presents.