CHRISTMAS EVERY DAY
193
mer and the angel whispered "Peace, peace," I had a vivid feeling
of being restored to a time that I had assumed was gone forever.
This experience, however, though surprising was not extraordi–
nary. The extraordinary thing was what happened three months later.
My mother-it was now the middle of March-sent me over to find
out whether "there was anything doing" with Uncle Franz. She
needed fruit. I wandered into the neighboring quarter-the air was
mild and it was twilight. Unsuspecting, I walked past the overgrown
piles of ruins and the untended parks, turned in at the gate to my
uncle's garden and suddenly stopped in amazement. In the evening
quiet I could distinctly hear someone singing in my uncle's living
room. Singing is a good old German custom, and there are lots of
spring songs-but here I clearly heard:
Unto us a child
is
born!
The King of all creation .
..
I must admit I was confused. Slowly I approached and waited for
the end of the song. The curtains were drawn and so I bent down to
the keyhole. At that moment the tinkling of the gnomes' bells reached
my ear, and I distinctly heard the angel whispering.
I did not have the courage to intrude, and walked slowly home.
My report caused general merriment in the family, and it was not
until Franz turned up and told us the details that we discovered what
had happened.
In our region Christmas trees are dismantled at Candlemas and
are then thrown on the rubbish heap where good-for-nothing children
pick them up, drag them through ashes and other debris and play all
sorts of games with them. This was the time when the dreadful
thing happened. On Candlemas Eve after the tree had been lighted
for the last time, and Cousin Johannes began to unfasten the gnomes
from their clamps, my aunt who had hitherto been so gentle set up a
dreadful screaming, so loud and sudden that my cousin was startled,
lost control of the swaying tree, and in an instant it was allover;
there was a tinkling and ringing; gnomes and bells, anvils and angel,
everything pitched down; and my aunt screamed.
She screamed for almost a week. Neurologists were summoned
by telegram, psychiatrists came rushing up in taxicabs-but
all
of
