It’s commonplace today to decry the commercialization of Christmas, to yearn for the kind of holiday depicted in old engravings: a candle-laden tree, a hearty Yule log burning in the fireplace, some nuts to crack and - for those both lucky and good - an orange. But our idea of a “traditional Christmas” leaves out an important element: superstitions.
The time between Christmas and the New Year was once thick with superstitions and folk beliefs. An old-fashioned Christmas would have included not only Christianized versions of pagan traditions (such as the tree and that Yule log), but many other rituals and auguries, some of which seem to us more like Halloween traditions than Christmas ones.
At about the same time that modern Christmas traditions such as sending Christmas cards and eating turkey began, researchers and enthusiasts collected many waning folk beliefs and compiled them into exhaustive lists of superstitions, mainly from Great Britain.
The results were impressive Victorian volumes with titles like “Traditions, Superstitions, and Folk-Lore” or “British Popular Customs, Present and Past,” which - thanks to Google Book Search or the Internet Archive - are now available for anyone looking to celebrate a truly old-fashioned Christmas.
For some, Christmas superstition begins at birth. People born on Christmas are considered either fortunate, as they supposedly cannot be drowned or hanged, or unfortunate, because they are more likely to be able to see ghosts and spirits.
(Sir Walter Scott said that the Spaniards attributed the gloomy mood of King Philip II, thought to have been born on Christmas, to his frequent ghost sightings, and not - as we might imagine - to always having his birthday and Christmas presents combined.)
Some also believe that those who are born on Christmas Eve turn into ghosts on that day every year while they sleep. If you were born on Christmas Eve and don’t want to have this happen to you, the remedy is to count the holes in a sieve from 11 o’clock on Christmas Eve until morning.
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Photo by Associated Press.
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