during six or seven weeks of the year, and where people live
out-of-doors during the long summer day of sunlight that follows.

In their low, stuffy homes which at Christmas are filled with guests
from the wandering Lapps, there is no room for the pretty tree and
decorative evergreens. The joy afforded these people at Yule-tide is
in the reunion of friends, in attending church services, in the
uniting of couples in marriage, and, alas, in the abundance of liquor
freely distributed during this season. The children are made happy by
being able to attend school, for at Christmas they are brought into
the settlements with friends for this purpose. They have only a few
weeks' schooling during the year, from Christmas to Easter, and while
the schoolmasters are stationed at the little towns, the children work
hard to gain the knowledge of books and religion which they crave.

In this terrible winter night of existence, amidst an appalling
darkness of Nature and Mind, the one great occasion of the year is
Christmas. Not the merry, bright, festive occasion of their more
favored brothers and sisters, but what to them is the happiest in the
year.

Christmas Eve passes unnoticed. The aurora may be even more beautiful
than usual, its waving draperies more fantastic, more gorgeous-hued,
but it is unnoticed by the Lapps who have seen it from childhood. Men,
women, children, servants, guests, and animals, crowd into the small,
low homes, without a thought of Santa Claus coming to visit them.
Children have no stockings to hang up, and there are no chimneys for
Santa to descend. In fact, he and his reindeer, with their loads of
treasured gifts, probably left this region with the sun, bound for
more congenial places.