Hanging up Their Stockings on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus's Gifts.

Te Aroha News, Volume VI, Issue 327, 22 December 1888, Page 4

Hanging up Their Stockings on Christmas Eve for Santa Claus's Gifts.

-^ _^*i|ja:Era children's custom of .<:"?•' $%f hanging up their stockings on Christmas Eve, as re- " *^\B ';i{ A> ceptacles for the good things ;^fsJp which Sanfca Claus feels t^..^wmj disposed fco drop down the -^-A t i^|w&' chimney, is a sturdy survival of fairyland which thrives in this ultra-scientific and somewhat materialistic world- of as if by way of attesting the strength and vitality of the pleasures of imagination. Children live in an enchanted realm, full of delightful illusions, of which the midnight ride of Santa Claus, over the nursery roofs, f scattering toys from his marvellous , sleighpdrawn by fleet footed reindeers, and shaking his fat sides with laughter as he pursues his cheerful way among the chimney-tots, is at once one of the most vivid and poetical. , " 1 Thousands of little hands, chubby and dimpled hands, will seek as many mantelpieces on Christmas Eve, and hang up their empty,' hose with the fullest faith in the legend; In the morning, fresh, from sweet slumbers and pleasant dreams, the same hands will come down and find them full, * without the slighest mistrust of the honesty of the miracle. They will see their toys and believe in their saint. With the same innocent trust which they place in the story that sleep is caused by the nightly round of the dustman, who scatters fine dust in their eyes, or in the other nursery tale that tells them that ' Sugar and spice, and all thirgs nice, Is what little gir's are made of, 1 they accept, without questioning, the story of the Christmas journey of the saint in the fur coat and frosted beard. H How it should happen that one sleigh could hold such a multitude of toys, or how in one night its driver could make the round of the whole world's roofs, are skeptical suggestions that never enter their minds. Later on, and all too soon, they will feel the force of such doubts, but then they will be no longer children The illusions of infancy will have vanished then, and the deepest well-springs of its happiness — boundless imagination and complete innocence — will have ceased to flow. In the meantime other troops of trustful children, to whom the gates of knowledge will not yet have opened heavily on the creaking hinges of hard fact, will still come crowding up to the mantlepieces on Christnfass " Eye, to' ; pia :. their stockings thereon, and their faith on the good Saint Nickl 'So the illusion, always being dispelled, will never die, and once a year the hearts of men and women, grown weary in the stern hard battle of life, will be called back to the children's fairyland, from which they themselves have so lone been expelled, and find again the lost chord of its beautiful music, that sweet strain of simple trust which can only be swept from the harp of life by baby fingers, ' Nearer the gate of paradise than we, Our children Dreathe its airs, its angels see.'