The Tree of Knowledge and the Christmas Tree. The Christmas spirit in Stifter's novella “Bergkristall”

I do not want to develop theories here; today is not the day for that. Certainly, one can say other things about the reasons for the emergence of the Christmas tree, but out of the feelings that arise in us when we stand next to it, when we let those feelings shine in our souls that connect us to the most childlike feelings of human beings on this holiday, out of this feeling, one wants to speak when looking at the Christmas tree, because one sees in it something like a renewal of the tree of paradise. This Christmas tree does not actually appear to be a pagan symbol, nor does it appear to be a Norse pagan symbol. When our earth is covered with snow, when icicles hang from the eaves of houses and over the trees, and people take refuge from those areas of the earth where, for months on end, the greenery and colorful flowers have delighted the eye and the fruits necessary for human sustenance have been offered, when people have to take refuge from all that, what is outside, at least at first, according to his perception, what is there for him to occupy himself with, what he has to live with throughout the spring and summer, when he has to take refuge in those rooms through which the snow looks in, the icicles look in, and he has to warm them from the inside, then the heathen probably felt something of what what could become of the world if this world were left to itself. The heathen felt the great winter at the end of earthly existence when he was so abandoned by the spirits of nature, by everything he felt as gnomes, undines, and sylphs, when he had to flee into the warmth of the oven, flee from made him feel abandoned by his beloved nature, and when he could only glimpse through a small opening that which was impossible to inhabit. When he was able to experience this abandonment, he felt, in this wintertime, the end of earthly existence spreading out infinitely, flooding everything, drowning everything.