From A Nervous Splendor (1979), by Frederic Morton:
“At Maria Theresienstrasse 8 the Freuds never indulged either in Christian rites or their own Jewish ones. The holidays meant simply a lighter schedule at the Pediatric Institute and still fewer patients in the doctor’s private practice. There was a bit more time for his weekly tarok game with pediatrician colleagues in their local coffeehouse; more time for his daily stomp around the Ringstrasse. Above all, he could devote extra hours to his paper in progress on hysteria, exploring his heresies on the subject. The holidays, in brief, gave him more leisure with which to jeopardize his so-called career.
Opposite the Freuds, on the top floor of Hessgasse 7, all was dark, all quiet at the Bruckner flat. Frau Kachelmayer needn’t fret over her frowsy Herr Professor. He had left town for a while, to overcome his old-bachelor loneliness during Christmas. The Abbot of Kremsmünster in Styria had invited him. Around the monastery, snow hung on the rolling woods. Inside, the monks sat in awe as Bruckner played the organ at midnight Mass, improvising far beyond the printed note into great godly dreams of sound. Afterward they prayed and gave him a little roast pork and more pilsner and much love.
Even in the insane asylum on the Brünlfeld there was, if not peace, good will among inmates. They presented their annual show starring Alois Bank, a well-known comedian who considered himself cured without ever expressing the desire to leave. At the Christmas revue he sailed through a routine of ten-year-old gags (the last he had done “outside”), but fell into a sudden stutter at the end. His audience took it to be intentional, and the evening ended with shrill gusts of hilarity.
In Vienna’s working-class districts Christmas was the art of make-do. For an Ottakring family it wasn’t uncommon to buy a fifty-kreuzer branch lopped from a big upper-class tree in the Inner City. This “tree,” propped against the wall, fit the narrowness of the tenement and the scantiness of the presents. Father might get a nice cravat from the secondhand store; mother, a darning kit; little Anna, a pair of coarse warm socks rolled around a candy ball.
All these bounties lay under the “tree,” swathed in red tissue paper which, wrinkled but still serviceable, was kept carefully from one Year to the next, as the stores charged extra for gift wrapping.
But even in Ortakring the night was very special. It was the one night in the year when the Bettgeher — the subtenant who rented only a bed, nothing else — joined the family for dinner; it featured not horsemeat but genuine beef that night. This one night of the year the oven serving the apartment did not go hungry. Christmas Eve of 1888 was crisp rather than cold, and coal so awfully expensive. Yet the father made sure that the oven was fully stoked before he retired; so that flames remained high throughout the Savior’s night and nobody needed to wake chilled into Christmas Day.”
Julia Upton 