Motley Stones by Adalbert Stifter

Author:Adalbert Stifter
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2021-05-04T00:00:00+00:00

ROCK CRYSTAL

Our church celebrates many different festivals that strike us to the heart. One can hardly conceive of a sweeter thing than Pentecost, or a thing more earnest and holy than Easter. The sorrow and melancholy of Holy Week and the solemnity of the Sunday that follows accompany us throughout our lives. One of the loveliest festivals is observed almost at the midpoint of winter, when the nights approach their longest and the days their shortest, when the sun shines most slantingly on our land and snow covers all the fields, the festival of Christmas. While many countries speak of the day before the feast of the Lord’s nativity as Christmas Eve, we call it the Holy Eve, the next day the Holy Day, and the night in between the Hallowed Night. The Catholic church marks Christmas Day, as the day of our Savior’s birth, with its greatest celebration; in most regions midnight itself, as the hour of the Lord’s birth, is hallowed with a splendorous night Mass, to which the bells send their summons through the pitch-dark wintry still midnight air, and the people hasten with lamps or on dark familiar paths from snowy mountains past rimy woods and through creaking orchards to reach the church from which the solemn sounds emerge and which looms with its long lit windows in the middle of the village girded by ice-sheathed trees.

The church festival is coupled with a festival of the home. In nearly every Christian land, children are shown the advent of the Holy Christ Child—a child like them, the most wondrous child that was ever in the world—as a joyful shining festive thing that works upon you all your life and sometimes, in old age, amid dim somber or poignant memories, appears as a glimpse of times gone by, flitting on bright shimmering wings across the bleak, sad, emptied night sky. The children are given the presents brought by the Holy Child for their delight, usually on Christmas Eve, when the deep dusk has fallen. Lights are lit, usually a great many of them, often little candles poised on the handsome green boughs of a fir or spruce tree in the middle of the room. The children are not allowed to come until the sign is given that the Holy Child has been there, and has left behind the presents he brought with him. Then the door is opened, the little ones are let inside, and in the lights’ marvelous glimmering splendor they see, hanging from the tree or arrayed on the table, things that far surpass all the visions of their imagination, things which they dare not touch and which at last, once they have received them, they carry about in their little arms all evening, and take to bed with them. When now and then they hear in their dreams the chimes of midnight calling the grown-ups to Mass, it may seem to them that the angels are flying through the sky, or that the Holy Child is going home, having visited all the children and brought each a splendid present.

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