If the light is let go out on Christmas Eve, some one in the house will die. When lights are brought in on Christmas Eve, if any one's shadow has no head, he will die within a year; if half a head, in the second half-year. If a hoop comes off a cask on Christmas Eve, some one in the house will die that year. If on Christmas Eve you make a little heap of salt on the table, and it melts over night, you will die the next year; if, in the morning, it remain undiminished, you will live. If you wear something sewed with thread spun on Christmas Eve, no vermin will stick to you. If a shirt be spun, woven, and sewed by a pure, chaste maiden on Christmas Day, it will be proof against lead or steel. If you are born at sermon-time on Christmas morning, you can see spirits. If you burn elder on Christmas Eve, you will have revealed to you all the witches and sorcerers of the neighbourhood (448. 319). If you steal hay the night before Christmas, and give the cattle some, they thrive, and you are not caught in any future thefts. If you steal anything at Christmas without being caught, you can steal safely for a year. If you eat no beans on Christmas Eve, you will become an ass. If you eat a raw egg, fasting, on Christmas morning, you can carry heavy weights. The crumbs saved up on three Christmas Eves are good to give as physic to one who is disappointed (462. IV. 1788-1801). It is unlucky to carry anything forth from the house on Christmas morning until something has been brought in. It is unlucky to give a neighbour a live coal to kindle a fire with on Christmas morning. If the fire burns brightly on Christmas morning, it betokens prosperity during the year; if it smoulders, adversity (246. 160). These, and many other practices, ceremonies, beliefs, and superstitions, which may be read in Grimm (462), Gregor (246), Henderson (469), De Gubernatis (427, 428), Ortwein (3l5), Tilte (370), and others who have written of Christmas, show the importance attached in the folk-mind to the time of the birth of Christ, and how around it as a centre have fixed themselves hundreds of the rites and solemnities of passing heathendom, with its recognition of the kinship of all nature, out of which grew astrology, magic, and other pseudo-sciences. _Flowers of the Christ-Child._ Many flowers are believed to have first sprung into being or to have first burst into blossom at the moment when Christ was born, or very near that auspicious hour. The Sicilian children, so Folkard tells us, put pennyroyal in their cots on Christmas Eve, "under the belief that at the exact hour and minute when the infant Jesus was born this plant puts forth its blossom." Another belief is that the blossoming occurs again on Midsummer Night (448. 492).