Music Welcome to Snewscast. The podcast designed to help you fall asleep. Find us on snewscast.com and follow us on Instagram at snewscast to find behind the scenes content. If you enjoy our show, please write a review on the podcast app. Also, share us with a friend. If you would like to get an email once a week, subscribe to the snooze letter at snoozecast.com. This episode is brought to you by our Patreon supporters, including our newest patron, Kara, and also by Sugarplums. Tonight, we'll read a short story by Charles Dickens called The Christmas Tree from 1850. It was only ten years earlier in 1840 that Queen Victoria's husband, Prince Albert, introduced the German concept of a Christmas tree to England. Before then, nobody in England had placed a Christmas tree in their home. Just as Dickens' a Christmas Carol is an actual song, a Christmas tree is barely a story, and the tree is merely a launching off point

for a series of dreamy impressions from the author's mind. Let's get cozy. Close your eyes. Relax your body to the softness of your bed. Now take a few deep breaths. I have been looking on this evening at a merry company of children assembled around that pretty German toy, a Christmas tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy cheek dolls hiding behind the green leaves, and there were real watches with movable hands at least and an endless endless capacity of being wound up. Dangling from innumerable twigs. There were French polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture, wonderfully made, in tin, at Woolverhampton. Perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping, there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men, and no wonder for their heads took off and showed them to be full of sugarplums. There were fidd syndrome, there were tambourines, books, work boxes, paint boxes, sweet meat boxes, and all kinds of boxes. There were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold in jewels. There were tea totems, hummingtops, needlecases, pen wipers, smelling bottles, conversation cards, two K holders. Real fruit made artificially dazzling with gold leaf, imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises. In short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend. There was everything, and more." This motley collection of odd objects clustering on the tree-like magic fruit and flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side. Some of the diamond eyes, admiring it, were hardly on a level with the table, and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts, and nurses, made a lively realization of the fancies of childhood, and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth after while the dormants of that well-remembered time. Being now at home again and alone, the only person in the house awake, My thoughts are drawn back by a fascination which I do not care to resist to my own childhood. I begin to consider what do we all remember best upon the branches of the Christmas tree of our own young Christmas days by which we climbed to real life. Straight in the middle of the room, cramped in the freedom of its growth by no no encircling walls or soon reached ceiling. A shadowy tree arises

and looking up into the dreamy brightness of its top. For I observe in this tree,

the singular property that it appears to grow downward towards the earth,

I look into my youngest Christmas recollections. All toys at first, I find, up yonder among the green holly and red berries, is the tumbler with his hands, his pockets. We wouldn't lie down.

But when... is the tumbler with his hands in his pockets. Who wouldn't lie down? But whenever he was put upon the floor, persisted in rolling his body about until he rolled himself still, and brought those lobster eyes of his to bear upon me when I affected to laugh very much. But in my heart of hearts was extremely doubtful of him, but could not be put away, either, for he used suddenly in highly magnified state to fly out of mammoth snuff boxes and dreams when least expected. Nor is the frog with cobbler's wax on his tail far off, for there was no knowing where he wouldn't jump. And when he flew over the candle and came upon one's hand with that spotted back, red on a green ground. He was horrible. A cardboard lady in a blue silkscirt who was stood up against the candlestick to dance and whom I see on the same branch was mild, and was beautiful. I never wondered what the dear old donkey with the pennears was made of then. His hide was real to the touch I recollect, and the great black horse with the round red spots all over him. The horse that I could even get upon, I never wondered what had brought him to that strange condition. Or thought that such a horse was not commonly seen at Newmarket. The four horses of no color, next to him, that went into the wagon of cheeses and could be taken out and stabled under the piano, appeared to have bits of fur tippet for their tails and other bits for their mains, and to stand on pegs instead of flags, but it It was not so when they were brought home for a Christmas present.

They were all right then. Neither was their harness unceremoniously nailed into their chests, as appears to be the case now. The tinkling works of the music cart, I did find out, to be made of quill tooth picks and wire, and I always thought that little tumbler in

his shirt sleeves perpetually swarming up one side of a wooden frame and coming down

head foremost on the other, rather a weak-minded person, though good-natured.

But the Jacobs ladder next to him made of little squares of red wood that went flapping and clattering over one another, each developing a different picture. And the whole in live in by small bells was a mighty marvel and a great delight. Ah, the doll's house, of which I was not proprietor, but where I visited. I don't admire the houses of Parliament half so much as that stone-fronted mansion with real-class windows, and or-steps, and a real balcony. Greener than I ever seen now, except at watering places, and even they afford but a poor imitation. And though it did open all at once, the entire house front, which was a blow, I admit, as cancelling the fiction of a staircase, it was but to shut it up again, and I could believe. Even open, there were three distinct rooms in it, a sitting room, and bedroom, elegantly furnished, in best of all, a kitchen with uncommonly soft fire irons, a plentiful assortment of diminutive utensils, oh the warming pan, and a tin man cook in profile, who was always going to fry two fish. What barmicide justice have I done to the noble feasts wherein the set of wooden platters figured, each with its own delicacy? As a ham or turkey, glued tight onto it, and garnished with something green which I recollect as moss. Could all the temperance societies of these later days, united, give me such a tea-drinking as I have had through the means of yonder little set of blue crockery, which really would hold liquid it ran out of the small wooden casket, I recollect and tasted of matches, and which which may be hold liquid. It ran out if the small wouldn't casket. I recollect and tasted of matches. And which made tea nectar. And if the two legs of the ineffectual little sugar tongs did tumble over one another and want purpose, like a bunch of hands, what does it matter? And if I did once, shriek out as a poison child, and strike the fashionable company with Concernation, by reason of having drunk a little teaspoon, inadvertently dissolved into hot tea, I was never the worst for it, except by a powder. Upon the next branches of the tree, lower down, hard by the green roller and gardening tools, how thick the books begin to hang? Thin books in themselves at first. But many of them, and with deliciously smooth covers of bright,

red or green, what fat black letters to begin with? A was an archer and shot at a frog. Of course he was. He was an apple pie also, and there he is. he was a good many things in his time, was a.

And so were most of his friends, except X, who had so little versatility that I never knew him to get beyond Xerxes, or Zintipi, like Y. Who was always confined to a yacht or a utri in Z, condemned forever to be a zebra or a zaini. But now, the very tree itself changes and becomes a beanstalk, the marvelous beanstalk up which Jack climbed to the giant's house. And now, these dreadfully interesting, double-headed giants, with their clubs over their shoulders, begin to stride along the bows in a perfect throng, and jack, how noble, with his sword of sharpness and his shoes of swiftness. Again, those old meditations come upon me as I gaze up at him, and I debate within myself whether there was more than one jack, which I am loath to believe possible, are only one genuine, original admirable Jack who achieved all the recorded exploits. Good for Christmas time is the ruddy color of the cloak, in which the tree making a forced of itself for her to trip through with her basket, little red riding hood comes to me one Christmas Eve. To give me information of the cruelty and treachery of that dissembling wolf who ate her grandmother, without making any impression on his appetite. She was my first love. I felt that if I could have married little red-riding hood, I should have known perfect bliss, but it was not to be. And there was nothing for it but to look out the wolf in the Noah's

Ark there, and put him late in the procession on the table as a monster who was to be degraded. Oh, the wonderful Noah's Ark.

It was not found.

See worthy. Oh, the wonderful nose arc. It was not found seaworthy when put in a washing tub, and the animals were crammed in at the roof, and needed to have their legs well shaken down before they could be got in. Even there, and then, ten to one, but they began to tumble out at the door, which was but imperfectly fassied with a wire latch. But what was that against it? Consider the noble fly, a size or two smaller than the elephant, the lady bird, the butterfly, all triumphs of art. Consider the goose whose feet were so small and whose balance was so indifferent that he usually tumbled forward and knocked down all the animal creation. Noah and and his family like idiotic tobacco stoppers and how the leopard stuck to warm little fingers and how the tails of the larger animals use gradually to resolve themselves into

afraid bits of string.

Hush.

Again, a forest.

And somebody up in a tree.

Not Robinhood.

Not balance. And somebody up in a tree, not Robinhood, not Valentine, not the Yellow Dwarf, I have passed him and all Mother Bunches wonders without mention. But in Eastern King with a glittering cimitar and turban, two Eastern kings, for I see another looking over his shoulder, down upon the grass, at the tree's foot lies the full length of a giant stretched asleep with his head in a lady's lap. Near them is a glass box, fastened with four locks of shining steel. Oh, now all common things become uncommon and enchanted to me. All lamps are wonderful. All the rings are talismans. Common flower pots are full of treasure, with a little earth scattered on the top. Trees are for Alibaba to hide in. Beef sticks are to throw down into the valley of diamonds. That the precious stones may stick to them. And be carried by the eagles to their nests. Once the traders with loud cries will shoe them. Any iron ring, let into stone, is the entrance to a cave which only waits for the magician and the little fire that will make the earth shake. All the dates imported come from the

same tree as that unlucky date, with whose shell the merchant knocked out the eye of the genies in visible sun. All olives are of the stock of that fresh fruit, concerning which the commander of the faithful overheard the boy conduct the fictitious trial of the fraudulent olive merchant. All apples are akin to the apple purchased with two others, from the Sultan's gardener for three sequins. All dogs are associated with the dog, really a transformed man, who jumped upon the Baker's counter and put his paw on the piece of bad money. All rice recalls the rice which the awful lady who was a ghoul could only peck by grains because of her nightly feasts in the burial place. My very rocking horse, there he is, with his nostrils turned completely inside out, should have a peg in his neck, by virtue thereof to fly away with me, as the wooden horse did with the Prince of Persia in sight of all his father's court. Yes, on every object that I recognize among those upper branches of my Christmas tree, I see this very light. I wake in bed at daybreak on the cold dark winter mornings, the white snow dimly be held outside through the frost on the window pane. Sister, sister, if you You are yet awake. I pray you finish the history of the young king of the Black Islands." He replies, If my lord the Sultan will suffer me to live another day, sister, I will not only finish that, but tell you a more wonderful story yet. Then, the gracious Sultan goes out, giving no orders for the execution, and we all three breathe again. At this height of my tree I begin to see cowering among the leaves, it may be born of turkey, or of pudding, or mince pie, or of these many fancies, jumbled with Robinson Crusoe on his desert island, Philip quarrel among the monkeys. Sanford and Merton, with Mr. Barrow Lowe, Mother Bunch and the Mask. Or it may be the result of indigestion, assisted by imagination and over-doctoring, a dream. It is so exceedingly indistinct. I can only make out that it is an immense array of shapeless things which appear to be planted on a vast exaggeration of lazy tongs that used to bear the toy soldiers, and to be slowly coming close to my eyes, and receding to an immeasurable distance. When it comes closest, it is worse. connection with it, I describe remembrances of winter nights incredibly long of being sent early into bed as a punishment for some small offense, and waking into hours with a sensation of having been asleep two nights. Out of this delight springs the toy theater, there it is, with its ladies and feathers in the boxes, and all its attendant occupation with pasting glue and gum and watercolors,

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