80 HOLLY AND MISTLETOE. 



Fieiicli keep up New Year's Day as their great 

 annual fete, thus showing how much more tlie 

 festivities depend, as we rightly say, upon "the 

 season " than upon the particular religious sanc- 

 tion. 



When Christmas came, however, it inherited, as 

 it were, from Roman Saturnalia and Druidical 

 festival many of their old distinctive heathen 

 ceremonies. In ancient Rome friends sent one 

 another sprigs of holly at the mid-winter feast, as 

 an emblem of good wishes for the coming year ; 

 and early Christians, ado[)ting the custom, con- 

 nected it with their own lioliday of tlie Nativity, 

 perhaps regarding the evergreen character of the 

 plant as emblematic of the eternal life secured 

 them b}' the events inaugurated on the very first 

 of all (.'in-istnias mornings. So, too, the early 

 Celtic races, in England and on the Continent, 

 attached some mysterious interest to the mistle- 

 toe, and connected it with tlie universal mid- 

 winter festivities ; and here in Britain the connec- 

 tion has still survived, though the mystical vir- 

 tues are almost forgotten, save in the kind of 

 sanctuary which the mistletoe-bough affords for a 

 certain amount of harndess ilirtation not else- 

 where or at other times so openly permitted. 

 The liberty to kiss a pretty girl beneath the 

 Cliristuias mistletoe lingers on, in fact, as the last 

 faint dying relic of the extreme license of the old 



