Beware the Twelve Days of Christmas! (Holiday Superstitions)

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As more and more Christmas decorations appear soon after Veterans Day, we should heed warnings from ye olde English holiday traditions. Too much Christmas too early or too late may be hazardous to your ...luck.

David Pickering, in Cassell's Dictionary of Superstitions, warned that "Christmas decorations should not be put up until Christmas Eve." A Dictionary of Superstitions, edited by Iona Opie and Moira Tatem, quoted several corroborating sources:

"My missus won't have a bit of holly in the house before Christmas, and I shouldn't think there's anyone in Harwood Dale (Yorkshire) who would," said a 45-year-old man in 1960.

"Mistletoe is never brought into the house before New Year's Day; to do so would be most unlucky," said Ella Mary Leather in The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire in 1912.

"Holly and ivy must not be taken into the house until Christmas Eve," said Roy Vickery in Unlucky Plants: A Folklore Survey in 1985.

To discard Christmas greenery along the roadside is also to run afoul of certain traditions. The problem is to determine which tradition to follow. "There is a curious disagreement over the disposal of evergreen decorations," wrote E. and M.A. Radford in their British Encyclopaedia of Superstitions, "particularly in Shropshire, where ... to burn them is regarded as lucky, and to throw them away as unlucky, whereas in the Shrewsbury, Ford, Worthen and Rugton localities, to burn them is to lay oneself open to ill-luck."

William Henderson, in Notes on the Folk Lore of the Northern Counties of England and the Borders, wrote that "it is thought sinful to burn evergreens which have been used for decorations. ... Many, they say, have been struck dead for so doing." The Feb. 7, 1951, issue of Farmer and Stock-Breeder told of the belief that "if holly ever went on fire there would be a death in the house during the twelve months that followed." Although a 12-year-old girl in 1960 advised that it was best just to put holly "in the bucket," a 61-year-old Surrey woman disagreed 28 years later: "We used to burn holly in the grate on Twelfth Night, with great excitement. I thought everybody did."

Whatever the case, the Encyclopaedia of Superstitions confirmed that "in every part of Britain it is held unlucky to keep evergreens after Twelfth Day (6th January)." Is there no sure way to get rid of them safely?

Count yourself lucky to have read this article. For in Shropshire Folk Lore: A Sheaf of Gleanings (1883), Charlotte Sophia Burne wrote that at Worthen "in the beginning of this century the evergreens were ... carried to the cows' 'Boosey' to be eaten by them." A "boosey" or "boosy" is a stall or manger.

Whatever you do, be thorough when you take the decorations down. A belief in Suffolk once held that bad luck or even death could ensue should even "a leaf or berry" be left behind in the house. In 1982, a teenage girl in Yorkshire said that "if by any chance we leave a piece of holly or other evergreen in the house after Twelfth Night we keep it in a box (in the house) until the following Christmas and then dispose of it (not before)." Four years later, a 63-year-old Sussex woman said, "I really worry if I haven't cleared away every trace of Christmas by Twelfth Day -- decorations, cards, everything."

• RELATED CHRISTMAS STORIES:

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                         It's Beginning to Look a Lot Like Saturnalia, Everywhere I Go 
 
                                           Christmas Had Nothing to Do with It -- The Secular Roots of Carols 
 
                                                                             Christmas Crimes & Misdemeanors