The extensive Maximilian Platz has suddenly grown up into booths and shanties, and looks very much like a temporary Western village. There are shops for the sale of Christmas articles, toys, cakes, and gimcracks; and there are, besides, places of amusement, if one of the sorry menageries of sick beasts with their hair half worn off can be so classed. One portion of the platz is now a lively and picturesque forest of evergreens, an extensive thicket of large and small trees, many of them trimmed with colored and gilt strips of paper. I meet in every street persons lugging home their little trees; for it must be a very poor household that cannot have its Christmas tree, on which are hung the scanty store of candy, nuts, and fruit, and the simple toys that the needy people will pinch themselves otherwise to obtain.
At this season, usually, the churches get up some representations for the children, the stable at Bethlehem, with the figures of the Virgin and Child, the wise men, and the oxen standing by. At least, the churches must be put in spick-and-span order. I confess that I like to stray into these edifices, some of them gaudy enough when they are, so to speak, off duty, when the choir is deserted, and there is only here and there a solitary worshiper at his prayers; unless, indeed, as it sometimes happens, when I fancy myself quite alone, I come by chance upon a hundred people, in some remote corner before a side chapel, where mass is going on, but so quietly that the sense of solitude in the church is not disturbed. Sometimes, when the place is left entirely to myself, and the servants who are putting it to rights and, as it were, shifting the scenes, I get a glimpse of the reality of all the pomp and parade of the services. At first I may be a little shocked with the familiar manner in which the images and statues and the gilded paraphernalia are treated, very different from the stately ceremony of the morning, when the priests are at the altar, the choir is in the organ-loft, and the people crowd nave and aisles. Then everything is sanctified and inviolate. Now, as I loiter here, the old woman sweeps and dusts about as if she were in an ordinary crockery store: the sacred things are handled without gloves. And, lo! an unclerical servant, in his shirt-sleeves, climbs up to the altar, and, taking down the silver-gilded cherubs, holds them, head down, by one fat foot, while he wipes them off with a damp cloth. To think of submitting a holy cherub to the indignity of a damp cloth!