Abstract
OF the popular customs associated with Christmas, few have a Christian origin. The aim of the early Church was to distract its followers from the great festivals of the heathen, and consequently pagan elements were allowed to be incorporated as freely in the observance of Christmas as they were in the other major feasts of the Christian calendar. Here the pietistic sentiment of the Mediterranean peoples has tended to preserve the mystic element of paganism rather than the saturnalian. Hence the devotion to the Midnight Mass; and, as the cult of the Madonna enshrines-the popular memory of the great pagan mother goddess, so the Cave of Zeus, of Adonis, and of Mithra survive in the cult of the Manger, in which both in the representations in the churches and in the popular shrines in the Italian streets, Mary, Joseph, and the animals kneel in adoration of the Child.1 In Spain the Manger is set up even in private houses, where one or two rooms may be set aside for the purpose. In England the cult may be traced in the belief, once common in the west country, but not confined to that area, that at twelve o'clock on Christmas Eve the oxen kneel in their stalls. A connexion, with more than a flavour of paganism, may also be inferred in the divinatory custom of placing a cake on the head or horns of an ox in its stall on Christmas Eve, once practised in Herefordshire and other western counties and in the north, the prosperity of the coming year being foretold by the direction in which the cake fell or was shaken off. To the Manger cult may also be ascribed the ‘vessel cup’ of northern England, a box or framework, usually decorated with evergreens, containing a doll, or more often two dolls representing the Madonna and Child, which was carried from house to house by ‘vessel cup’ women or children. In the name ‘vessel cup,’ a corruption of ‘wassail,’ northern paganism combines with that of the south.
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Christmas Customs and their Origins. Nature 122, 964–967 (1928). https://doi.org/10.1038/122964a0
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/122964a0