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Usage examples of customs.

These customs transferred to Christmas are to a great extent religious or magical rites intended to secure prosperity during the coming year, and there is also the familiar Christmas feasting, apparently derived in part from the sacrificial banquets that marked the beginning of winter.

December 17, but the festal customs were kept up for seven days, thus lasting until the day before our Christmas Eve.

I venture to hope that, with all its imperfections, it may be of some use to the more serious student, as a rough outline map of the field of Christmas customs, and as bringing together materials hitherto scattered through a multitude of volumes in various languages.

Its direct influence on Christmas customs has probably been little or nothing.

Modern research has tended to disprove the idea that the old Germans held a Yule feast at the winter solstice, and it is probable, as we shall see, that the specifically Teutonic Christmas customs come from a New Year and beginning-of-winter festival kept about the middle of November.

It is in these customs, and in secular mirth and revelry, not in Christian poetry, that we must seek for the expression of early lay feeling about Christmas.

None of these, except the feast of the Holy Innocents, have any special connection with the Nativity or the Infancy, and the popular customs connected with them will come up for consideration in our Second Part.

This class of customs has often, especially in the first millennium of our era, been the object of condemnations by ecclesiastics, and represents the old paganism which Christianity failed to extinguish.

The Church has played a double part, a part of sheer antagonism, forcing heathen customs into the shade, into a more or less surreptitious and unprogressive life, and a part of adaptation, baptizing them into Christ, giving them a Christian name and interpretation, and often modifying their form.

Christianized even in appearance, and obviously identical with heathen customs against which the Church thundered in the days of her youth.

In attempting to account for Christmas customs we must be mindful, therefore, of the tentative nature of the theories put forward.

Now as for them who on those days observe any heathen customs, it is to be feared that the name of Christian will avail them nought.

Roman customs either spread to Germany, or were paralleled there, is shown by a curious letter written in 742 by St.

Teutonic date, and is still in Germany an important folk-feast attended by many customs derived from the beginning-of-winter festival.

November, and show them in procession, suggesting, as far as may be, the probable origins of the customs observed.