our Saviour's birth is celebrated,
The bird of dawning singeth all night long:
And then, they say, no spirit can walk abroad;
The nights are wholesome; then no planets strike,
No fairy takes, nor witch hath power to charm;
So hallow'd and so gracious is the time."

No other holiday has so rich an heritage of old customs and observances
as Christmas. The Yule Log has from time immemorial been haled to the
open fire-place on Christmas Eve, and lighted with the embers of its
predecessor to sanctify the roof-tree and protect it against those evil
spirits over whom the season is in everyway a triumph. Then the wassail
bowl full of swimming roasted apples, goes its merry round. Then the
gift-shadowing Christmas tree sheds its divine brilliance down the path
of the coming year; or stockings are hung for Santa Claus (St. Nicholas)
to fill during the night. Then the mistletoe becomes a precarious
shelter for maids, and the Waits--descendants of the minstrels of
old--go through the snow from door to door, singing their mellow old
carols, while masquerades and the merry Christmas game of Snapdragon are
not forgotten.[D]

[Footnote D: An exhaustive study of the history and customs of Christmas
has been made by W.F. Dawson in "Christmas and its Associations."]

Even the Christmas dinner has its special observances. In many an
English hall the stately custom still survives of bearing in a boar's
head to inaugurate the meal, as a reminder of the student of Queens
College, Oxford, who, attacked by a boar on Christmas day, choked him
with a copy of Aristotle and took his head back for dinner. The mince
pie, sacred to the occasion, is supposed to commemorate in its mixture
of oriental ingredients the offerings made by the wise men of the East.
As for turkey and plum pudding, they have a deep significance, but it is
clearer to the palate than to the brain.

Elise Traut relates the legend that on every Christmas eve the little
Christ-child wanders all over the world bearing on its shoulders a
bundle of evergreens. Through city streets and country lanes, up and
down hill, to proudest castle and lowliest hovel, through cold and storm
and sleet and ice, this holy child travels, to be welcomed or rejected
at the doors at which he pleads for succor. Those who would invite him
and long for his coming set a lighted candle in the window to guide him
on his way hither. They also believe that he comes to them in the guise
o