  Young lady kissing the cheek of an older woman Family Congratulation.—Page 134. Of all the festivals which crowd the Christian calendar there is none that exercises an influence so strong and universal as that of Christmas; and those varied superstitions, and quaint customs, and joyous observances, which once abounded throughout the rural districts of England, are at no period of the year so thickly congregated or so strongly marked as at this season of unrestrained festivity and extended celebration. The reasons for this are various and very obvious. In the case of a single celebration, which has to support itself by its own solitary influence long, perchance, after the feeling in which it originated has ceased to operate, whose significance is perhaps dimly and more dimly perceived (through the obscurity of a distance, year after year receding further into shadow) by its own unaided and unreflected light, the chances are many that the annually increasing neglect into which its observance is likely to fall, shall finally consign it to an entire obliteration. But a cluster of festivals, standing in a proximate order of succession, at once throwing light upon each other and illustrated by a varied and numerous host of customs, traditions, and ceremonies,—of which, as in a similar cluster of stars, the occasional obscuration of any one or more would not prevent their memory being suggested and their place distinctly indicated by the others,—present greatly multiplied probabilities against their existence being ever entirely forgotten or their observation wholly discontinued. The arrangement by which a series of celebrations—beautiful in themselves, and connected with the paramount event in which are laid the foundations of our religion—are made to fall at a period otherwise of very solemn import (from its being assumed as the close of the larger of those revolutions of time into which man measures out the span of his transitory existence), and the chance which has brought down to the same point and thrown together the traces of customs and superstitions both of a sacred and secular character, uniting with the crowd of Catholic observances, off-shoots from the ancient Saturnalia, remains of old Druidical rites, and glimpses into the mythology of the Northern nations, have written a series of hieroglyphics upon that place of the calendar, which, if they cannot be deciphered in every part, are still, from their number and juxtaposition, never likely to be overlooked. But though these causes are offered as accounting for the preservation of many customs which, without them, would long since have passed into In every way, and by many a tributary stream, are the holy and beneficent sentiments which belong to the period increased and refreshed. Beautiful feelings, too apt to fade within the heart of man amid the chilling influences of worldly pursuit, steal out beneath the sweet religious warmth of the season, and the pure and holy amongst the hopes of earth assemble, to place themselves under the protection of that eternal hope whose promise is now, as it were, yearly renewed. Amid the echoes of that song which proclaimed peace on earth and good-will towards men, making no exclusions, and dividing them into no classes, rises up a dormant sense of universal brotherhood in the heart; and something like a distribution of the good things of the earth is suggested in favor of those, destitute here, who are proclaimed as joint participators in the treasure thus announced from heaven. At no The very presence of a lengthened festivity—for festivity can never be solitary—would, apart from its sacred causes, promote these wholesome effects. The extended space of time over which this festival is spread, the protracted holiday which it creates, points it out for the gathering together of distant friends whom the passing nature of an occasional and single celebration would fail to collect from their scattered places of the world. By this wise and beautiful arrangement the spell of home is still made to cast its sweet and holy influence along the sterile regions as along the bright places of after-life, and from the dark valleys and the sunny hilltops of the world to call back alike the spoiled of fortune and the tired and travel-stained to refresh themselves again and again at the fountain of their calmer hopes and purer feelings. A wise and beautiful arrangement this would be, in whatever season of the year it might be placed! Wise and beautiful is any institution which sets up a rallying-place for the early affections and re-awakens the sacred sympathies of youth,—which, from that well-head of purity and peace, sends forth, as it were, a little river of living waters, to flow with revivifying "Wi' joy unfeigned, brothers and sisters meet, An' each for other's welfare kindly spiers;" and as the long-separated look once more into the "sweet, familiar faces," and listen in that restored companionship to strains such as "once did sweet in Zion glide" (even as they listened long ago, and, it may be, with some who are gone from them for ever),— "Hope springs, 'exulting on triumphant wing' There ever bask in uncreated rays, No more to sigh or shed the bitter tear, Together hymning their Creator's praise In such society, yet still more dear, While ceaseless time moves round in an eternal sphere." To this tone of feeling the services of the Church have for some time previously been gradually adapting the mind. During the whole period of Advent a course of moral and religious preparation has been going on, and a state of expectation is by degrees excited, not unlike that with which the Jews were waiting for the Messiah, of old. There is, as it were, a sort of watching for the great event, a questioning where Christ shall be born, and an earnest looking out for his star in the East that we may "come to worship him." The feeling awakened by the whole series of these services—unlike that suggested by some of those which commemorate other portions of the same sacred story—is entirely a joyous one. The lowly manner of the Saviour's coming, the exceeding humiliation of his appointments, the dangers which beset his infancy, and his instant rejection by those to whom he came, are all forgotten in the fact of his coming itself, in the feeling of a mighty triumph and the sense of a great deliverance, or only so far remembered as to temper the triumph and give a character of tenderness to the joy. "The services of the Church about this season," says Washington Irving, "are extremely tender and inspiring. They dwell on the Nor is the religious feeling which belongs to this season suffered to subside with the great event of the nativity itself. The incidents of striking interest which immediately followed the birth of the Messiah, the persecutions which were directed There is, too, in the lengthened duration of this festival a direct cause of that joyous and holiday spirit which, for the most part (after the first tenderness of meeting has passed away, and a few tears perhaps been given, as the muster-roll is perused, to those who answer to their names no more), pervades all whom that same duration has tempted to assemble. Regrets there will no doubt, in most cases, be, for these distant and periodical gatherings together of families but show more prominently the "A change" he may find "there, and many a change! Faces and footsteps and all things strange! Gone are the heads of the silvery hair, And the young that were, have a brow of care, And the place is hushed where the children played!" till, amid the bitter contrasts of the past with the present, and thoughts of "the loved, the lost, the distant, and the dead," something like "A pall, And a gloom o'ershadowing the banquet-hall, And a mark on the floor as of life-drops spilt," may spoil his ear for the voice of mirth, and darken all the revels of the merry Christmas-tide.
To few assemblages of men is it given to come together in the scene of ancient memories without having to "remember such things were that were most precious." But excepting in those cases in which the suffering is extreme or the sorrow immediate, after a few hours given to a wholesome and perhaps mournful retrospect, the mind readjusts itself to the tone of the time, and men for the most part seem to understand that they are met for the purpose of being as merry as it is in their natures to be. And to the attainment of this right joyous frame of mind we have already said that a sense of the duration of the festival period greatly contributes. In the case of a single holiday the mind has scarcely time to take the appropriate tone before the period of celebration has But when the holiday of to-day terminates only that it may make way for the holiday of to-morrow, and gladness has an ancient charter in virtue of which it claims dominion over a series of days so extended that the happy school-boy (and some who are quite as happy as school-boys, and as merry too) cannot see the end of them for the blaze of joyous things that lies between,—then does the heart surrender itself confidently to the genius of the time, and lets loose a host of cheerful and kindly feelings, which it knows will not be suddenly thrown back upon it, and heaps up pleasant devices upon the glowing flame of mirth, as we heap up logs on the roaring fire, laying them decently aside at the end of the season, as we lay aside the burned-out brand of the Yule log to re-kindle the Christmas fire and the Christmas feeling of another year. But there is yet another reason, in aid of those which we have enumerated, accounting for an observance of the Christmas festivities more universal, and a preservation of its traditions more accurate and entire, than are bestowed in England upon the festival customs of any other period of the year. This reason, which might not at first view seem so favorable to that end as in truth it is, is to be found in the outward and natural aspects of the "Last of the months, severest of them all. .... For lo! the fiery horses of the Sun Through the twelve signs their rapid course have run; Time, like a serpent, bites his forked tail, And Winter, on a goat, bestrides the gale; Rough blows the North-wind near Arcturus' star, And sweeps, unreined, across the polar bar." The halcyon days, which sometimes extend their southern influence even to our stern climate, and carry an interval of gloomy calm into the heart of this dreary month, have generally ere its close given place to the nipping frosts and chilling blasts of mid-winter. "Out of the South" hath come "the whirlwind, and cold out of the North." The days have dwindled to their smallest stature, and "It is, methinks, a morning full of fate! It riseth slowly, as her sullen car Had all the weights of sleep and death hung at it! She is not rosy-fingered, but swoln black! Her face is like a water turned to blood, And her sick head is bound about with clouds, As if she threatened night, ere noon of day! It does not look as it would have a hail Or health wished in it—as of other morns!" And the general discomforts of the season are bemoaned by old Sackville, with words that have a wintry sound, in the following passage, which we extract from "England's Parnassus:"— "The wrathfull winter, proching on a pace, With blustring blast had all ybard the treene; And old Saturnus, with his frosty face, With chilling cold had pearst the tender greene; The mantle rent wherein inwrapped beene The gladsome groves that now lay over-throwne, The soyle, that erst so seemely was to seeme, Was all dispoiled of her beauties hewe, And stole fresh flowers (wherewith the Somer's queene Had clad the earth), now Boreas blast downe blew; And small fowles flocking, in their songs did rew The Winter's wrath, where with each thing defast, In wofull wise bewayl'd the Sommer past: Hawthorne had lost his motley liverie, The naked twigs were shivering all for cold, And, dropping down the teares aboundantlie, Each thing, methought, with weeping eye me told The cruell season, bidding me withhold Myselfe within." The feelings excited by this dreary period of transition, and by the desolate aspect of external things to which it has at length brought us, would seem, at first view, to be little in harmony with a season of festival, and peculiarly unpropitious to the claims of merriment. And yet it is precisely this joyless condition of the natural world which drives us to take refuge in our moral resources, at the same time that it furnishes us with the leisure necessary for their successful development. The spirit of cheerfulness which, for the blessing of man, is implanted in his nature, deprived of the many issues by which, at other seasons, it walks abroad and breathes amid the sights and sounds of Nature, is driven to its own devices for modes of manifestation, and takes up its station by the blazing hearth. In rural districts, the varied occupations which call the sons of labor abroad into the fields are suspended by the austerities of the time; and "With his ice, and snow, and rime, Let bleak winter sternly come! There is not a sunnier clime Than the love-lit winter home." Amid the comforts of the fireside, and all its sweet companionships and cheerful inspirations, there is something like the sense of a triumph obtained over the hostilities of the season. Nature, which at other times promotes the expansion of the feelings and contributes to the enjoyments of man, seems here to have promulgated her fiat against their indulgence; and there is a kind of consciousness of an inner world created, in evasion of her law,—a tract won by the genius of the affections from the domain of desolation, spots of sunshine planted by the heart in the very bosom of shadow, a pillar of fire lit up in the darkness. And thus the sensation of a respite from toil, the charms of renewed companionship, the consciousness of a general sympathy of enjoyment running along all the links of the social chain, and the contrasts established within to the discomforts without, are all components of that propitious feeling to which the religious There is, too (connected with these latter feelings, and almost unacknowledged by the heart of man), another moral element of that cheerful sentiment which has sprung up within it. It consists in the prospect, even at this distant and gloomy period, of a coming spring. This is peculiarly the season of looking forward. Already, as it were, the infant face of the new year is perceived beneath the folds of the old one's garment. The business of the present year has terminated, and along the night which has succeeded to its season of labor have been set up a series of illuminations, which, we know, will be extinguished only that the business of another seed-time may begin. Neither, amid all its dreary features, is the natural season without its own picturesque beauty, nor even entirely divested of all its summer indications of a living loveliness, or all suggestions of an eternal hope. Not only hath it the peculiar beauties of old age, but it hath besides lingering traces of that beauty which old age hath not been able wholly to extinguish, and which come finely in aid of the moral hints and religious hopes of the season. The former—the graces which are peculiar to the season itself—exist in many a natural aspect and grotesque effect, which is striking both for the variety it offers and for its own intrinsic loveliness. "We may find it in the wintry boughs, as they cross the cold blue sky, While soft on icy pool and stream the pencilled shadows lie, When we look upon their tracery, by the fairy frost-work bound, Whence the flitting red-breast shakes a shower of blossoms to the ground." The white mantle which the earth occasionally puts on with the rapidity of a spell, covering, in the course of a night and while we have slept, the familiar forms with a sort of strangeness that makes us feel as if we had awakened in some new and enchanted land; the fantastic forms assumed by the drifting snow; the wild and fanciful sketching of old winter upon the "frosty pane;" the icicles that depend like stalactites from every projection, and sparkle in the sun like jewels of the most brilliant water; and, above all, the feathery investiture of the trees above alluded to, by which their minute tracery is brought out with a richness shaming the carving of the finest chisel,—are amongst the features which exhibit the inexhaustible fertility of Nature in the production of striking and beautiful effects. Hear how one of our best poetesses, Mary Howitt, sings of these graces:— "One silent night hath passed, and lo, How beautiful the earth is now! All aspect of decay is gone, The hills have put their vesture on, "Say not 'tis an unlovely time! Turn to the wide, white waste thy view; Turn to the silent hills that rise In their cold beauty to the skies, And to those skies intensely blue. .... "Walk now among the forest trees: Saidst thou that they were stripped and bare? Each heavy bough is bending down With snowy leaves and flowers,—the crown Which Winter regally doth wear. "'Tis well; thy summer garden ne'er Was lovelier, with its birds and flowers, Than is this silent place of snow, With feathery branches drooping low, Wreathing around thee shadowy bowers!" While on the subject of the natural beauties of this season, we must introduce our readers to some admirable verses which have been furnished to us by our friend Mr. Stoddart, the author of that fine poem the "Death-Wake," and in which its peculiar aspects are described with a very graphic pen: A WINTER LANDSCAPE. The dew-lark sitteth on the ice, beside the reedless rill; The leaf of the hawthorn flutters on the solitary hill; The wild lake weareth on its heart a cold and changed look, And meets, at the lip of its moon-lit marge, the spiritual brook. Idly basks the silver swan, near to the isle of trees, They wash the eider as they play about the bird of grace, And boom, in the same slow mood, away, to the moveless mountain-base. The chieftain-deer, amid the pines, his antlered forehead shows, And scarcely are the mosses bent where that stately one arose; His step is as the pressure of a light beloved hand, And he looketh like a poet's dream in some enchanted land! A voice of Winter, on the last wild gust of Autumn borne, Is hurried from the hills afar, like the windings of a horn; And solemnly and heavily the silver birches groan, And the old ash waves his wizard hand to the dim, mysterious tone. And noiselessly, across the heaven, a gray and vapory shred Is wandering, fed by phantom clouds that one by one are led Out of the wide North, where they grow within the aged sea, And in their coils the yellow moon is laboring lazily! She throws them from her mystic urn, as they were beckoned back By some enchantress, working out her spells upon their track; Or gathers up their fleecy folds, and shapes them, as they go, To hang around her beautiful form a tracery of snow. Lo, Winter cometh!—and his hoar is heavy on the hill, And curiously the frostwork forms below the rimy rill; The birth of morn is a gift of pearl to the heath and willow-tree, From the calm of the lake a vapor steals its restless wreath away, And leaves not a crisp on the quiet tarn but the wake of the swan at play; The deer holds up the glistening heath, where his hoof is lightly heard, And the dew-lark circleth to his song,—sun-lost and lonely bird! But the season hath other striking aspects of its own. Pleasant, says Southey,— "To the sobered soul, The silence of the wintry scene; When Nature shrouds her in her trance, In deep tranquillity. "Not undelightful now to roam The wild heath sparkling on the sight; Not undelightful now to pace The forest's ample rounds, "And see the spangled branches shine, And snatch the moss of many a hue, That varies the old tree's brown bark, Or o'er the gray-stone spreads." Mr. Southey might have mentioned, too,—as belonging to the same class of effects with those produced by the mosses "of many a hue" that "vary the old tree's brown bark,"—those members of the forest which retain their dead and many tinted leaves till the ensuing spring, hanging occasional wreaths of strange and fantastic beauty in the white Amongst the traces of a former beauty not utterly extinguished, and the suggestions of a summer feeling not wholly passed away, we have those both of sight and scent and sound. The lark, "all independent of the leafy spring," as Wordsworth says, has not long ceased to pour his anthem through the sky. In propitious seasons, such as we have enjoyed for some years past, he is almost a Christmas-carol singer. The China-roses are with us still, and under proper management will stay with us till the snowdrops come. So will the anemones and the wallflowers; and the aconite may be won to come, long "before the swallow dares, and take the winds of January with beauty." The cold air may be kept fragrant with the breath of the scented coltsfoot, and the lingering perfume of the mignonette. Then we have rosemary, too, "mocking the winter of the year with perfume,"— "Rosemary and rue, which keep Seeming and savor all the winter long." "It looks," says Leigh Hunt, pleasantly, "as if we need have no winter, if we choose, as far as flowers are concerned." "There is a story," he adds, "in Boccaccio, of a magician who conjured up a garden in winter-time. His magic consisted in his having a knowledge beyond his time; and magic pleasures, so to speak, await on all who choose to exercise knowledge after his fashion." But what we would allude to more particularly here are the evergreens, which, with their rich and clustering berries, adorn the winter season, offering a provision for the few birds that still remain, and hanging a faint memory of summer about the hedges and the groves. The misletoe with its white berries, the holly (Virgil's acanthus) with its scarlet berries and pointed leaves, the ivy whose berries are green, the pyracanthus with its berries of deep orange, the arbutus exhibiting its flowers and fruit upon adjacent boughs, the glossy laurel and the pink-eyed laurestine (not to speak of the red berries of the May-bush, the purple sloes of the blackthorn, or others which show their clusters upon leafless boughs, nor of the evergreen trees,—the pine, the fur, the cedar, or the cypress), are all so many pleasant remembrancers of the past, and so many types to man of that which is imperishable in his own nature. And it is probably both because they are such remembrancers of what the heart so much loves, and such types of what it so much desires, group of four singers by a gate Country Carol Singers.—Page 157.
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