It was that Christmas-day that did it; I’m quite convinced of that; and the way it was is, what I am going to tell you. You see, among the various family customs of us Crowfields, the observance of all sorts of _fêtes_ and festivals has always been a matter of prime regard; and among all the festivals of the round ripe year, none is so joyous and honored among us as Christmas. Let no one upon this prick up the ears of Archæology, and tell us that by the latest calculations of chronologists our ivy-grown and holly-mantled Christmas is all a hum,--that it has been demonstrated, by all sorts of signs and tables, that the august event it celebrates did not take place on the 25th of December. Supposing it be so, what have we to do with that? If so awful, so joyous an event _ever_ took place on our earth, it is surely worth commemoration. It is the _event_ we celebrate, not the _time_. And if all Christians for eighteen hundred years, while warring and wrangling on a thousand other points, have agreed to give this one 25th of December to peace and good-will, who is he that shall gainsay them, and for an historic scruple turn his back on the friendly greetings of all Christendom? Such a man is capable of re-writing Milton’s Christmas Hymn in the style of Sternhold and Hopkins. In our house, however, Christmas has always been a high day, a day whose expectation has held waking all the little eyes in our bird’s nest, when as yet there were only little ones there, each sleeping with one eye open, hoping to be the happy first to wish the merry Christmas and grasp the wonderful stocking. This year our whole family train of married girls and boys, with the various toddling tribes thereto belonging, held high festival around a wonderful Christmas-tree, the getting-up and adorning of which had kept my wife and Jennie and myself busy for a week beforehand. If the little folks think these trees grow up in a night, without labor, they know as little about them as they do about most of the other blessings which rain down on their dear little thoughtless heads. Such scrambling and clambering and fussing and tying and untying, such alterations and rearrangements, such agilities in getting up and down and everywhere to tie on tapers and gold balls and glittering things innumerable, to hang airy dolls in graceful positions, to make branches bear stiffly up under loads of pretty things which threaten to make the tapers turn bottom upward!