One of Austrian realist writer Adalbert Stifter’s most popular stories was a
Christmas tale “Bergkristall” (“Rock Crystal”), published in 1852 as part of a
collection of stories subtitled, “a gift for a special occasion,” marking the book’s
imagined role in the holiday celebration.2 The story begins with a narrator
unfolding a classic mountain village holiday scene—a “set piece,” as Martin
Swales calls it—that moves from the church calendar to village activities in
the crisp nighttime air, before eventually settling into a homey interior scene
of children on Christmas Eve.3 Much like our contemporary conventions for
the holiday in the United States, Stifter’s opening depiction of gift-giving in-
volves two tales: one of the parents, who orchestrate the appearance of gifts
and trimmings, and one of the children, who encounter and delight in the
appearance of these new objects. Stifter’s two views of Christmas, we might
say, appear like a parallax—two observational standpoints, though oriented
toward the same matter, that appear differently. He deploys his poetic realist
technique in a way that emphasizes this difference as the temporality of expe-
rience: While parents enjoy the children’s activities in a nostalgic way, the
experience of childhood by children themselves is profoundly bound up with
the present time of enjoyment:


Lights are lit, usually a great many of them, often little candles poised
on the handsome green boughs of fir or spruce tree in the middle of the room.
The children are not allowed to come until the sign is given
that the Holy Child has been there, and has left behind the presents
he brought with him. Then the door is opened and the little ones are
let inside, and in the marvelous glimmering splendor they see, hang-
ing from the tree or arrayed on the table, things that far surpass all the
visions of their imagination, things which they dare not touch and
which at last, once they have received them, they carry about in their
little arms all evening, and take to bed with them.4


Although the tale’s plot will take a threatening turn, as the narrative follows
its two child-protagonists Sanna and Konrad through a blizzard on their way
back from grandmother’s house, the opening vision of the holiday nonetheless
invites the reader to tarry in the cozy microcosm of the home, where the cold
winter is only softly perceptible through the windows:5 “When the next day
comes, Christmas Day, it seems so festive to them when they stand in the warm
parlor attired in their finest clothes . . . when there’s a festive midday meal,
better than on any other day of the year, and . . . [s]cattered throughout the
parlor, on a little chair or on the bench or on the windowsill, lie the presents
of the evening before, magical but already more familiar.”6 With an eye to the
ordinary details, the narrator sets the “festival of the home” in parallel with
the Holy Child in a curious way. In the nineteenth century, the Austrian and
southern German figure of the Christ Child (Christkind) was the traditional
unseen bringer of gifts, often imagined as an angelic childlike figure,7 but in
“Rock Crystal” Stifter instead describes the figure as something belonging to
the children’s visible world: namely, “a joyful, shining festive thing” (“ein heit-
eres glänzendes feierliches Ding”).8 This brief narrative sequence recasts the
story of Christmas as the familiar narrative of the transfiguration of the gifted
object into ordinary experience: from the eruptive delight in finally getting to
open a present, to the seamless absorption of that treasured surprise into the
background of the child’s quotidian world