To connect heavy feeding with Christmas, the third in rank of the great festivals of the Church, is not a universal custom, and is, in fact, a peculiarity of our own country, arising from the rearing and management of cattle in early times, when English pasture land furnished a splendid means of enriching its owners by the production of “hides” and leather. Large numbers of cattle had to be stalled during winter and fed on stored herbage, and a great many were at this season killed and the meat “salted down,” since it would not pay to keep them on stored food. It was not until the introduction of “root-crops” that oxen could be kept in any number through the winter months. Hence there was an excess of fresh meat and fat about Christmas time, and the “roast beef,” plum puddings, and mincemeat of Christmas fare were abundant. The true Christmas pudding and mince-pie had meat as part of their components, and, of course, beef-suet enters largely into their composition at the present day. The practice of eating sweet fruits and preserves with meat (as in the true mince-pie) still lingers in this country, but has become less general than it is in Germany. We still eat red-currant jelly with roast mutton, and also with hare, and apple sauce is considered appropriate to roast pork and to goose; but pickled plums and cherries and sugared crab-apples, which are usually taken with meat in Germany, are not known to us. I have heard a schoolboy express indignation at being given plums with roast meat. Mincemeat, for mince-pies, was originally (like a “Cornish pasty,” in which raisins are mixed with meat) one of these combinations of sweetness and strength—of sugar and meat—the taste for which has unaccountably disappeared in these days of mechanical uniformity and lack of “homely cheer.”