"By placing the tale in a gentle, nonthreatening domestic setting of silk draperies and comfortable sofas, the tale's fatalistic tone was accepted by the bourgeois adult reader who could identify with the tragic fir-tree's anxious longing and limitless pining.Andersen had written tales with unhappy endings before ("The Little Mermaid" and "The Steadfast Tin Soldier", for example) but a new note was struck with "The Fir-Tree"—a note of "deeply ingrained pessimism, suggesting not only the mercilessness of fate but the pointlessness of life itself, that only the moment is worthwhile."