文档介绍：Some Short Christmas Stories
Some Short Christmas
Stories
by Charles Dickens
1
Some Short Christmas Stories
A CHRISTMAS TREE
I have been looking on, this evening, at a pany of children
assembled round 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-
cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches
(with movable hands, at least, and an 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 Wolverhampton),
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 sugar-plums; there were
fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-
boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there
were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and
jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns,
swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of
pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-
cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-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 bac