"Christmas is comingIn England many centuries back, Martinmas Day was considered a harbinger for Advent, which was 40 days in length originally and began on November 15.
The goose is getting fat,
Please to put a penny in the old man's hat..."
For a great book about Christmas customs, Clement Miles' Christmas Customs and Traditions is worthwhile. This is a scholarly tome and may not be everyone's cup of tea. What makes the volume more fascinating is that any recent copy is a reprint of the original 1912 edition, so Miles' view of Christmas is back from when the Christmas tree in a majority of American homes was a new custom and the "jolly old saint" alternatively has his name spelt as Santa Klaus. Even better, different countries still held their old customs. Scots still "first footed" on Hogmanay, English farmers still wassailed their apple trees, Germans still considered St. Stephen's Day as devoted to horses, and [sadly] the cruel custom of killing the wren was still practiced.
Miles begins with the Christian practices of the holiday, beginning with sacred music and continuing through devotion and drama. However, mindful that most of our holiday customs derive from the pagan, he devotes the rest of the book, the majority, to those practices, covering pre-Christian customs and then continuing through the old feast calendar, from All-Hallows (All Saints) Day through Martinmas, the saints' days such as Andrew, Clement, and Catherine, and so to St. Nicholas Day, St. Lucia, and the Christmastide holidays themselves, not just Christmas Eve and Day, but those afterwards, through Epiphany and Candlemas.
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