Story 3 of 12 · Denmark · 1844
The Fir-Tree
Who it suits: Every age, read with an adult nearby. The ending is sad.
A young fir tree in a Danish forest is always waiting for something better to happen, and never notices how happy it is while it waits. Hans Christian Andersen was born in 1805 in Odense, Denmark, to a shoemaker and a washerwoman, and went to Copenhagen at fourteen to become an actor. He became instead one of the most translated writers in history. “The Fir-Tree” was published on 21 December 1844, in the same small book as “The Snow Queen”.
Decorated Christmas trees had come to Denmark from the German lands in the early 1800s, and in 1844 they were still a new fashion in Copenhagen homes. The decorated tree in the story has candles fixed to its branches, paper bags of sweets, gilded apples and walnuts, and a star at the top.
The story is a fairy tale for children and a story for adults at the same time. It ends in sadness, because the tree learns too late that the days it hurried through were its best ones.
In the book, The Fir-Tree is printed in full with five notes beside the words they explain, its map, its city view and its illustration.
