DESIREE 2024 - Linen
The very famous Christmas collector's plate from the Danish company Desiree.
Made of porcelain and painted in the famous Copenhagen blue color, it annually depicts the fairy tales of Hans Christian Andersen.
The Christmas 2024 collector's plate is entitled: "The Linen"
Hans Christian Andersen is a Danish writer. He is one of the great fairy tale authors of the nineteenth century, he reused the great heritage of Nordic fairy tales in an original way, infusing it with a characteristic optimistic spirit. A profound idyllic-religious feeling and a bitter knowledge of life come together, in the best fairy tales, to create that duplicity and simultaneity of fantastic-realistic vision, which allows the most daring changes of register, the most daring mixtures of colours. Son of a poor shoemaker, he spent his childhood in his closed world of a sensitive and imaginative wastrel. In 1819 he went to Copenhagen to seek his fortune and tried his hand at singing, acting and dancing.
A wonderful decoration, designed and made with skill, a unique special object to give as a gift to celebrate a date or to collect.
Linen
A fairy tale by Hans Christian Andersen
The flax was in bloom. It had beautiful blue flowers, as soft as a moth's wings, or perhaps even softer. The sun shone on the linen and the rain clouds watered it, and he liked it as a child likes to be washed and to have a kiss from its mother; the children become even more beautiful and the same happened to the linen. "People say that I am very well," exclaimed the flaxen, "and that I will grow very tall and turn into a piece of cloth. Oh, how happy I am! I am certainly the happiest of all! I am very well and will become someone. How the sun cheers me up and how good the air smells, and how the rain refreshes me! I am immensely happy, the happiest of all!" “Of course, of course!” said the fence boards. “You don't know the world, but we know it and we've got knots from so many worries!” and they creaked pitifully: Snip, snap, snurre, Basselurre, the song is over. "It is not true!" replied the linen. "The sun is shining, the rain is good, I feel like I'm growing and I know I'm blooming! I'm the happiest of all!"
But one day people came and grabbed the flax from the top and uprooted it, how bad! Then he was put in water, as if they were going to drown him, and finally he was placed on the fire, and he felt like he was roasting: what suffering! “You can't always feel good!” said the linen to himself. “To know something, you have to try it!” But it became more and more terrible. The linen was torn and chopped, pounded and combed: yes, what did he know about how to say it! It was put on the spool and, snurre rur! it was impossible to collect one's thoughts! “I was extraordinarily happy!” he thought in his pain. "You have to be happy with the good things you have received. Happy, happy!" and he was still saying this when he found himself on the loom. So it turned into a beautiful piece of cloth. All the linen, every single fiber, was transformed into that single piece. "It's incredible! I would never have thought it. Luck is with me! The fence boards didn't really know life, with their: Snip, snap, snurre, Basselurre!
The song isn't finished at all! Start right now! It's amazing! Sure, I suffered a little, but now I've become someone! I'm the happiest of all! I am so strong and soft, so white and long. It's a whole other thing than being a plant, even if I had flowers. I was not treated and I only received water when it rained. Now I'm well served! The maid turns me over every morning and every evening I get watered with the watering can. Even the pastor's wife talked about me and said I was the prettiest bolt of cloth in the whole parish. I couldn't be happier!”
The canvas was brought home and treated with scissors. How they cut, how they tore, and how the needles pricked when they came! It wasn't fun. The cloth was transformed into twelve pieces of linen, the kind that cannot be named, but which all people must have. Behold, twelve heads of that. "Now I have become important! It was my destiny! A blessed destiny! Now I am useful to the world, and so it must be, because this is true joy. Now we are twelve leaders, but we still remain one, we are a dozen! What incredible joy!"
Years passed, and, in the end, they wore out. “The end is coming for everything, sooner or later!” each leader exclaimed. “I would have liked to hold on a little longer, but you can't expect the impossible!” Thus they were transformed into rags and shreds; they believed that everything was now finished, because they were chopped and macerated and cooked, and other things that they didn't even know, and in the end they became a beautiful, very thin white paper. “What a surprise, what a wonderful surprise!” exclaimed the card. "Now I am even thinner than before, and they will have to write about me. What will they write? What extraordinary luck!" And the most beautiful stories were written, and people listened to them because they were so true and so beautiful that they made people better and wiser. It was indeed a blessing that, through words, was imparted to the paper.
"It is much more than I ever dreamed of, when I was a little blue flower of the field! How could I have imagined that I should bring joy and knowledge among men? But it is so! The Lord knows that I personally have done nothing except what was necessary for me to survive. Yet he is showering me with joys and honors, one after another. Each time I repeat to myself: The song is finished! and instead something much better and higher happens to me. Now I will certainly have to travel, be sent all over the world, so that all men can read me! It is the most probable thing. Before I had little blue flowers, now for every flower I have the most beautiful thoughts! But the paper didn't travel, instead it went to the printing house and everything that had been written on it was printed in a book, or rather, in many hundreds of books, because so many people could derive joy and usefulness from it; if that single sheet of paper on which it was written had been sent around the world, it would have already been worn out halfway. “This is the most reasonable solution!” thought the written paper. "I hadn't thought of it at all! So I stay at home and receive honors like an old grandfather. They wrote about me, the words from the pen slipped to me. I stay here and the books go around. Now something is starting to be accomplished. How happy I am! How lucky I am!"
The paper was collected in bundles and placed on a shelf. “It's nice to rest and meditate on your work!” exclaimed the card. "And it's right that we gather to meditate on what we have inside. Only now do I know precisely what I have inside me. Knowing yourself is true progress. Who knows what will happen now? Of course something new will happen, because it's always like this." One day all the paper was put in the fireplace; it had to be burned, since it could not be given to the grocer to wrap in butter or sugar. All the children in the house had gathered to see the paper catch fire, to see the numerous red sparks of the ash that ran away and went out, one after the other, very quickly; they look like the children leaving school, and the last spark is the teacher, you think he has already left, but instead here he arrives shortly after the others. All the paper was put into the fire in a single bundle. How it immediately caught fire! “Uh!” he said, and it was all a flame. It darted very high, where the linen had never been able to raise its little blue flower, and shone as the white canvas had never been able to shine. All the written letters turned red in an instant and all the words and thoughts caught fire.
“Now I'm coming to the sun!” said a voice in the flames, and it was as if thousands of voices had said it at the same time; and the flame went out into the open through the fireplace; there, even more ethereal than the flame itself and invisible to the eyes of men, very small creatures flew, as many as there had been little flax flowers. They were even lighter than the flame from which they were born, and when it went out and only black ash remained on the paper, they danced one last time before settling, then left only their footprints, the red sparks. The children had left school, the teacher last, it was really fun to watch them, and the children of the house began to sing around the extinguished ashes:
Snip, snap, snurre, Basselurre, the song is over. But each of those little invisible beings said: "The song is never over! This is the most beautiful thing! I know it and for this reason I am the happiest in the world!".
But the children didn't see and didn't understand and it was right that way, because children don't have to know everything.