When we were not dancing or playing games, we literally ate our way through the two holiday weeks. Pastry by the mile did we eat, and general indigestion brooded over the town when it emerged into the white light of the new year. At any rate it ought to have done so. It is a prime article of faith with the Danes to this day that for any one to go out of a friend's house, or of anybody's house, in the Christmas season without partaking of its cheer, is to "bear away their Yule," which no one must do on any account. Every house was a bakery from the middle of December until Christmas Eve, and oh! the quantities of cakes we ate, and such cakes! We were sixteen normally, in our home, and Mother mixed the dough for her cakes in a veritable horse-trough kept for that exclusive purpose. As much as a sack of flour went in, I guess, and gallons of molasses and whatever else went to the mixing. For weeks there had been long and anxious speculations as to "what Father would do," and gloomy conferences between him and Mother over the state of the family pocket-book, which was never plethoric; but at last the joyful message ran through the house from attic to kitchen that the appropriation had been made, "even for citron," which meant throwing all care to the winds. The thrill of it, when we children stood by and saw the generous avalanche going into the trough! What would not come out of it! The whole family turned to and helped make the cakes and cut the "pepper-nuts," which were little squares of spiced cake-dough we played cards for and stuffed our pockets with, gnawing them incessantly. Talk about eating between meals: ours was a continuous performance for two solid weeks. The pepper-nuts were the real staple of Christmas to us children. We paid forfeits with them in the game of scratch-nose (jackstraws), when the fellow fishing for his straw stirred the others and had his nose scratched with the little file in the bunch as extra penalty; in "Under which tree lies my pig?" in which the pig was a pepper-nut, the fingers of the closed hands the trees; and in Black Peter. In this last the loser had his nose blackened with the snuff from the candle until advancing civilization substituted a burnt cork. Christmas without pepper-nuts would have been a hollow mockery indeed. We rolled the dough in long strings like slender eels and then cut it, a little on the bias. They were good, those nuts, when baked brown. I wish I had some now.