If you were a child in Spain, you would not be talking of Christmas trees in the late December days, but of _navidades_, or “nativities.” These are tiny models of a scene supposed to be Bethlehem. Some of them are very simple, made of cardboard, colored paper, bits of stone and sand. On one side is a hill, built up of paper or plaster, and in the side of it is the cave to which the gentle cattle were used to come for food and shelter. By its crude match-wood manger stand or sit little figures of the Holy Family. Often these are modelled from beautiful designs, the work of famous artists who put their highest skill into creating the tiny images of the mother and the Holy Child. Outside the cave stand the patient oxen, and perhaps the donkey upon which the Infant Christ is to be carried out of the reach of Herod. Overhead sparkles a shining star. Some of these simple “nativities” can be bought for a few cents. Others made of better materials, or with greater care, and with many figures, are more costly. These have, besides the Holy Family, perhaps, a fire of ruddy tinfoil around which shepherds gather, looking, in their straight brown cloaks, as if they might have stepped from your Noah’s ark, and back of them, on a hillside of green cloth, little white wool lambs feed quietly. In still another you may even see a smuggler with a slouch hat pulled down over his eyes, hiding with a load of tobacco behind a paper rock to leave the road free for the Three Kings who in all their tinsel go journeying to worship the Holy Child. The roads are rough with bits of cork, the river is a strip of glass, and the bridge over which the camels of the Wise Men pass is clearly of paper stone; the rabbit hiding in the evergreens is quite as large as the donkey saddled for the flight into Egypt; but in the magic of “the Holy Night” all seem to be real, to live and feel, so natural and tender is the children’s faith in these simple “nativities,” which are repeated on a larger scale in all the churches.