The municipal tree of Chicago–whether it be the great tree on the lake front or the offspring which each local community rears as a pledge of its own Christmas joys–is a triumph of civic ideals. It is a symbol to the thousands, who are strangers–if not in fact, at least in that pitifully intense way in which mankind can be alone in the millions that make a great city–that the city is human. And it has been such a short time that the city has been human–that it has had time to be anything but a growing, hungry, physically developing giant of a child. Out of its rompers, Chicago is now, and present at the great moment of decorating the Christmas tree of the ‘children.’ There is something adolescent and very charming and very _naïve_ about this Christmasy Chicago. It has just reached the time when it feels that the world is taking some notice of it, when it feels its first thrills of conquest, when it cleans out its pockets, throws away the broken knife blades and the slightly worn wads of gum and the marbles and substitutes the picture of the chorus girl and the pocket comb. It is washing behind its ears. And it can blush with gorgeous _naïveté_ at the thought of making a social _faux-pas_. It is terribly self-conscious, and like all growing youth it still has its cosmic dreams. Chicago’s delight in its Christmas tree is at the same time the delight of the child in any glittering gaudily lighted scene, and the delight of the youth who remembers his baby days and his passionate belief in Santa Claus and sees in the great tree a monument to the few years that have intervened. There is romance in that thought. Within the memory of many men and women who walk beneath the great tree, within the lifetime of one of the thousands of trees that have been brought to the making of the great tree and its lesser relatives, the spot did not exist at all where now the gigantic realization of a dream of a Christmas tree stands. It was a wave on its way to lap a sandy shore, or caught in the fastnesses of ice. And the shore when it was reached was a spot where children picnicked in summer, where horses were brought to the water’s edge for a drink, where wagons were washed, where the water itself was dipped up in buckets and carried into the little houses of the village. It was a spot where bemuffled children slid back and forth in winter, cautiously keeping inshore. The spot where the great tree stood the first time it was made, before the outlying communities had their separate celebrations, on the land just east of Madison Street and north of the Art Institute, was in the very early days a public burying-ground. Rude storms from the east frequently gnawed at the earth until it had given up its hidden coffins, battered them into fragments, and left scattered, gruesome remains on the shore when the calm came. Within the lifetime of a man it has grown from burying-ground to the waterfront park of one of the great cities of the world.