Some Christmas Stories

Some Short Christmas Stories by Charles Dickens gathers A Christmas Tree, What Christmas is as we Grow Older, The Poor Relation’s Story, The Child’s Story, The Schoolboy’s Story and Nobody’s Story. The piece headed A CHRISTMAS TREE and dated 1850 describes a merry company of children assembled round a pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree.

The tree stood in the middle of a great round table, lighted by a multitude of little tapers, with rosy-cheeked dolls and real watches among its twigs. A first-person passage asks when a dreadful Mask first looked at the speaker, who put it on, and why the sight of it was so frightening that it is an era in the speaker's life. A narrator says that avarice was, unhappily, his uncle Chill’s master-vice, and that though the uncle was rich, he pinched, and scraped, and clutched, and lived miserably. A passage describes a man who, in his short evening snatches at his fireside, saw the demon Ignorance arise and take his children to itself.