The winter festival is thus, like the summer festivals, a moment in the cycle of agricultural ritual, and is therefore shared in by the whole village in common. It is also, and from the time of the institution of harvest perhaps preeminently, a festival of the family and the homestead. This side of it finds various manifestations. There is the solemn renewal of the undying fire upon the hearth, the central symbol and almost condition of the existence of the family as such. This survives in the institution of the ‘Yule-log,’ which throughout the Germano-Keltic area is lighted on Christmas or more rarely New Year’s eve, and must burn, as local custom may exact, either until midnight, or for three days, or during the whole of the Twelve-night period, from Christmas to Epiphany[928]. Dr. Tille, intent on magnifying the Roman element in western winter customs, denies any Germano-Keltic origin to the Christmas blaze, and traces it to the Roman practice of hanging lamps upon the house-doors during the Saturnalia and the Kalends[929]. It is true that the Yule-log is sometimes supplemented or even replaced by the Christmas candle[930], but I do not think that there can be any doubt which is the primitive form of rite. And the Yule-log enters closely into the Germano-Keltic scheme of festival ideas. The preservation of its brands or ashes to be placed in the mangers or mingled with the seed-corn suggests many and familiar analogies. Moreover, it is essentially connected with the festival fire of the village, from which it is still sometimes, and once no doubt was invariably, lit, affording thus an exact parallel to the Germano-Keltic practice on the occasion of summer festival fires, or of those built to stay an epidemic.
Another aspect of the domestic character of the winter festival is to be found in the prominent part which children take in it. As quêteurs, they have no doubt gradually replaced the elder folk, during the process through which, even within the historical purview, ritual has been transformed into play. But St. Nicholas, the chief mythical figure of the festival, is their patron saint; for their benefit especially, the strenae or Christmas and New Year’s gifts are maintained; and in one or two places it is their privilege, on some fixed day during the season, to ‘bar out’ their parents or masters[931].
Thirdly, the winter festival included a commemoration of ancestors. It was a feast, not only of riotous life, but of the dead. For, to the thinking of the Germano-Keltic peoples, the dead kinsmen were not altogether outside the range of human fellowship. They shared with the living in banquets upon the tomb. They could even at times return to the visible world and hover round the familiar precincts of their own domestic hearth. The Germans, at least, heard them in the gusts of the storm, and imagined for them a leader who became Odin. From another point of view they were naturally regarded as under the keeping of earth, and the earth-mother, in one aspect a goddess of fertility, was in another the goddess of the dead. As such she was worshipped under various names and forms, amongst others in the triad of the Matres or Matronae. In mediaeval superstition she is represented by Frau Perchte, Frau Holda and similar personages, by Diana, by Herodias, by St. Gertrude, just as the functions of Odin are transferred to St. Martin, St. Nicholas, St. John, Hellequin. It was not unnatural that the return of the spirits, in the ‘wild hunt’ or otherwise, to earth should be held to take place especially at the two primitive festivals which respectively began the winter and the summer. Of the summer or spring commemoration but scant traces are to be recovered[932]; that of winter survives, in a dislocated form, in more than one important anniversary. Its observances have been transferred with those of the agricultural side of the feast to the Gemeinwoche of harvest[933]; but they are also retained, at or about their original date, on All Saints’ and All Souls’ days[934]; and, as I proceed to show, they form a marked and interesting part of the Christmas and New Year ritual. I do not, indeed, agree with Dr. Mogk, who thinks that the Germans held their primitive feast of the dead in the blackest time of winter, for it seems to me more economical to suppose that the observances in question have been shifted like others from November to the Kalends. But I still less share the view of Dr. Tille, who denies that any relics of a feast of the dead can be traced in the Christmas season at all[935].
Bede makes the statement that the heathen Anglo-Saxons gave to the eve of the Nativity the name of Modranicht or ‘night of mothers,’ and in it practised certain ceremonies[936]. It is a difficult passage, but the most plausible of various explanations seems to be that which identifies these ceremonies with the cult of those Matres or Matronae, corresponding with the Scandinavian disar, whom we seem justified in regarding as guardians and representatives of the dead. Nor is there any particular difficulty in guessing at the nature of the ceremonies referred to. Amongst all peoples the cult of the dead consists in feeding them; and there is a long catena of evidence for the persistent survival in the Germano-Keltic area of a Christmas and New Year custom closely parallel to the alfablót and disablót of the northern jul. When the household went to bed after the New Year revel, a portion of the banquet was left spread upon the table in the firm belief that during the night the ancestral spirits and their leaders would come and partake thereof. The practice, which was also known on the Mediterranean, does not escape the animadversion of the ecclesiastical prohibitions. The earlier writers who speak of it, Jerome, Caesarius, Eligius, Boniface, Zacharias, the author of the Homilia de Sacrilegiis, if they give any explanation at all, treat it as a kind of charm[937]. The laden table, like the human over-eating and over-drinking, is to prognosticate or cause a year of plentiful fare. The preachers were more anxious to eradicate heathenism than to study its antiquities. Burchardus, however, had a touch of the anthropologist, and Burchardus says definitely that food, drink, and three knives were laid on the Kalends table for the three Parcae, figures of Roman mythology with whom the western Matres or ‘weird sisters’ were identified[938]. Mediaeval notices confirm the statement of Burchardus. Martin of Amberg[939], the Thesaurus Pauperum[940] and the Kloster Scheyern manuscript[941] make the recipient of the bounty Frau Perchte. In Alsso’s Largum Sero it is for the heathen gods or demons[942]; in Dives and Pauper for ‘Atholde or Gobelyn[943].’ In modern survivals it is still often Frau Perchte or the Perchten or Persteln for whom fragments of food are left; in other cases the custom has taken on a Christian colouring, and the ancestors’ bit becomes the portion of le bon Dieu or the Virgin or Christ or the Magi, and is actually given to quêteurs or the poor[944].
It is the ancestors, perhaps, who are really had in mind when libations are made upon the Yule-log, an observance known to Martin of Braga in the sixth century[945], and still in use in France[946]. Nor can it be doubted that the healths drunk to them, and to the first of them, Odin, lived on in the St. John’s minnes, no less than in the St. Martin’s minnes, of Germany[947]. Apart from eating and drinking, numerous folk-beliefs testify to the presence of the spirits of the dead on earth in the Twelve nights of Christmas. During these days, or some one of them, Frau Holle and Frau Perchte are abroad[948]. So is the ‘wild hunt[949].’ Dreams then dreamt come true[950], and children then born see ghosts[951]. The werwolf, possessed by a human spirit, is to be dreaded[952]. The devil and his company dance in the Isle of Man[953]: in Brittany the korrigans are unloosed, and the dolmens and menhirs disclose their hidden treasures[954]. Marcellus in Hamlet declares:
‘Some say that ever ’gainst that season comes
Wherein our Saviour’s birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long;
And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,