[ [81] With this may be compared the fair still held in Rome in the Piazza Navona just before Christmas, at which booths are hung with little clay figures for use in presepi (see p. [113]). One cannot help being reminded too, though probably there is no direct connection, of the biscuits in human shapes to be seen in German markets and shops at Christmas, and of the paste images which English bakers used to make at this season.[{10}]
[ [82] Among the Scandinavians, who were late in their conversion, a pre-Christian Yule feast seems to have been held in the ninth century, but it appears to have taken place not in December but about the middle of January, and to have been transferred to December 25 by the Christian king Hakon the Good of Norway (940-63).[{28}]
[ [83] It is only right to mention here Professor G. Bilfinger's monograph “Das germanische Julfest” (Stuttgart, 1901), where it is maintained that the only festivals from which the Christmas customs of the Teutonic peoples have sprung are the January Kalends of the Roman Empire and the Christian feast of the Nativity. Bilfinger holds that there is no evidence either of a November beginning-of-winter festival or of an ancient Teutonic midwinter feast. Bilfinger's is the most systematic of existing treatises on Christmas origins, but the considerations brought forward in Tille's “Yule and Christmas” in favour of the November festival are not lightly to be set aside, and while recognizing that its celebration must be regarded rather as a probable hypothesis than an established fact, I shall here follow in general the suggestions of Tille and try to show the contributions of this northern New Year feast to Christmas customs.
[ [84] Accounts of such maskings are to be found in innumerable books of travel. In Folk-Lore, June 30, 1911, Professor Edward Westermarck gives a particularly full and interesting description of Moroccan customs of this sort. He describes at length various masquerades in the skins and heads of beasts, accompanied often by the dressing-up of men as women and by gross obscenities.
[ [85] Another suggested explanation connects the change of clothes with rites of initiation at the passage from boyhood to manhood. “Manhood, among primitive peoples, seems to be envisaged as ceasing to be a woman.... Man is born of woman, reared of woman. When he passes to manhood, he ceases to be a woman-thing, and begins to exercise functions other and alien. That moment is one naturally of extreme peril; he at once emphasizes it and disguises it. He wears woman's clothes.” From initiation rites, according to this theory, the custom spread to other occasions when it was desirable to “change the luck.”
[ [86] According to Sir John Rhys, in the Isle of Man Hollantide (November 1, Old Style, therefore November 12) is still to-day the beginning of a new year. But the ordinary calendar is gaining ground, and some of the associations of the old New Year's Day are being transferred to January 1, the Roman date. “In Wales this must have been decidedly helped by the influence of Roman rule and Roman ideas; but even there the adjuncts of the Winter Calends have never been wholly transferred to the Calends of January.”[{4}]
[ [87] In Burne and Jackson's “Shropshire Folk-Lore” (p. 305 f.) there are details about cakes and other doles given to the poor at funerals. These probably had the same origin as the November “soul-cakes.”
[ [88] Cf. pp. [191-2] and [235-6] of this volume.
[ [89] The prominence of “Eves” in festival customs is a point specially to be noticed; it is often to them rather than to the actual feast days that old practices cling. This is perhaps connected with the ancient Celtic and Teutonic habit of reckoning by nights instead of days—a trace of this is left in our word “fortnight”—but it must be remembered that the Church encouraged the same tendency by her solemn services on the Eves of festivals, and that the Jewish Sabbath begins on Friday evening.
[ [90] Attempts are being made to suppress the November carnival at Hampstead, and perhaps the 1911 celebration may prove to have been the last.