ANCIENT FEARS

Bay of Plenty Beacon, Volume 4, Issue 197, 24 December 1941, Page 6

ANCIENT FEARS

WIPED OUT AT CHRISTMAS ,Why is it considered unlucky to walk under a ladder? Why are people afraid to wear green or to take hawthorn blossom into the house? Why is there such a prejudice against sitting down thirteen to a meal? Why do we "touch wood?" In the Middle Ages ladders were very much connected with gallows, and we may inherit from those years our shrinking from the now innocent ladder; or it may come fi'om as far back as the cave men days, when our ancestors feared to walk beneath a tree, lest some evil should pounce on them from above. Green is the fairies' colour and the hawthorn their own particular tree, and "the little people" arc sometimes spiteful. Up the airy mountain, Down the rushy glen, We daren't go a-hunting, For fear cf little men. Judas Iscariot, the thirteenth at the Last Supper, went out from thence to liis treachcry and final doom. We touch wood as those of long ago touched, as they thought, a fragment of the true Cross, to: avert evil. But the most superstitious need have no fear at Christmas time, and Shakespeare tells us why. And then, they say, no spirit dare stir abroad, The nights are no planets strike. No fairy tales or witch hath power to charm, So hallow'd and so gracious is the time. At midnight on Christmas Eve the oxen kneel to the Babe of Bethlehem; and the little fairies, shut out during the rest of the year, may listen to the church bells, if they remain under a holly bush—the tree symbolic of the life of Christ; red berries for His blood, white flowers for His purity, sharp points for His crown of thorns. In some countries "the stranger's meal" was always prepared, the fire

made up and a candle left burning in the window, lest there should come again the Mother and Child who found no refuge but a stable on that first Christmas Eve.