“We do not belong here,” said Phœbe; “we came to see the Blooming. We are at aunt Katherine’s, and she is looking over her linen press.”
The minister frowned.
“And the rest of the people?”
“They are all at work,” cried Roger, coming up; “the cooper has his shop open, and the mercer is selling, and they have all put away the cakes and the mistletoe, and there is to be no Christmas until the true day comes.”
“Nonsense!” cried the minister. “Jacob, bring me my hat!” and without taking off his gown he strode down into the village.
But it was all in vain; the minister talked and scolded, but the people went on with their work. They would not go to church; they would not sing their carols nor hang holly and mistletoe boughs.
“This New Way might do for lords and ladies,” they said, “but as for them the Christmas kept by their fathers, and marked by the blooming of the Thorn, was their Christmas,” and so the sexton closed the church, and the discomfited minister went home; and he was the only person in Quainton who that day ate a Christmas dinner.
When the news came to London and to the court of how these people, and others in different villages, refused to adopt the New Style, the little fat king and his lords and ladies laughed; but they soon found it was a serious matter, and so it was ordered that the churches should be opened also on “old Christmas” and sermons preached on that day wherever the people wished them. And thus it was that our sixth of January, known as “Twelfth Night,” “little,” or “old Christmas,” came to be a holiday.
But Roger and Phœbe spent one year of their lives without a Christmas. They returned home upon the twenty-sixth, and found that there the New Christmas had been kept; and as they could not go back to Quainton when the Old Christmas came, they missed it altogether.
As for the Thorn-tree! Who can tell whether it still blooms? In the chronicles which tell of the Glastonbury bush, and of the Quainton excitement, there is no mention made of its after blooming; and the chances are Phœbe’s mother was a true prophet when she said it was possible that between the Old Style and the New Style the Thorn would become confused and bloom no more for any Christmas-day.