INTRODUCTION
The Origin and Purpose of Festivals--Ideas suggested by
Christmas--Pagan and Christian Elements--The Names of the
Festival--Foundation of the Feast of the Nativity--Its Relation to
the Epiphany--December 25 and the _Natalis Invicti_--The Kalends of
January--Yule and Teutonic Festivals--The Church and Pagan
Survivals--Two Conflicting Types of Festival--Their Interaction--Plan
of the Book.
It has been an instinct in nearly all peoples, savage or civilized, to
set aside certain days for special ceremonial observances, attended by
outward rejoicing. This tendency to concentrate on special times answers
to man's need to lift himself above the commonplace and the everyday, to
escape from the leaden weight of monotony that oppresses him. "We tend to
tire of the most eternal splendours, and a mark on our calendar, or a
crash of bells at midnight maybe, reminds us that we have only recently
been created."[1]{1} That they wake people up is the great justification
of festivals, and both man's religious sense and his joy in life have
generally tended to rise "into peaks and towers and turrets, into
superhuman exceptions which really prove the rule."{2} It is difficult
to be religious, impossible to be merry, at every moment of life, and
festivals are as sunlit peaks, testifying, above dark valleys, to the
eternal radiance. This is one view of the purpose and value of festivals,
and their function of cheering people and giving them larger perspectives
has no doubt been an important reason for their maintenance in the past.
If we could trace the custom of festival-keeping back to its origins in
primitive society |18| we should find the same principle of
specialization involved, though it is probable that the practice came
into being not for the sake of its moral or emotional effect, but from
man's desire to lay up, so to speak, a stock of sanctity, magical not
ethical, for ordinary days.
The first holy-day-makers were probably more concerned with such material
goods as food than with spiritual ideals, when they marked with sacred
days the rhythm of the seasons.{3} As man's consciousness developed, the
subjective aspect of the matter would come increasingly into prominence,
until in the festivals of the Christian Church the main object is to
quicken the devotion of the believer by contemplation of the mysteries of
the faith. Yet attached, as we shall see, to many Christian festivals,
are old notions of magical sanctity, probably quite as potent in the
minds of the common people as the more spiritual ideas suggested by the
Church's feasts.
