Besides the customs which form part of the agricultural or the domestic observances of the winter feasts, there are others which belong to these in their quality as feasts of the New Year. To the primitive mind the first night and day of the year are full of omen for the nights and days that follow. Their events must be observed as foretelling, nay more, they must as far as possible be regulated as determining, those of the larger period. The eves and days of All Saints, Christmas, and the New Year itself, as well as in some degree the minor feasts, preserve in modern folk-lore this prophetic character. It is but an extension and systematization of the same notion that ascribes to each of the twelve days between Christmas and Epiphany a special influence upon one of the twelve months of the year[961]. This group of customs I can only touch most cursorily. The most interesting are those which, as I have just said, attempt to go beyond foretelling and to determine the arrival of good fortune. Their method is symbolic. In order that the house may be prosperous during the year, wealth during the critical day must flow in and not flow out. Hence the taboos which forbid the carrying out in particular of those two central elements of early civilization, fire[962] and iron[963]. Hence too the belief that a job of work begun on the feast day will succeed, which conflicts rather curiously in practice with the universal rustic sentiment that to work or make others work on holidays is the act of a churl[964]. Nothing, again, is more important to the welfare of the household during the coming year than the character of the first visitor who may enter the house on New Year’s day. The precise requirements of a ‘first foot’ vary in different localities; but as a rule he must be a boy or man, and not a girl or woman, and he must be dark-haired and not splay-footed[965]. An ingenious conjecture has connected the latter requirements with the racial antagonism of the high-instepped dark pre-Aryan to the flat-footed blonde or red-haired invading Kelt[966]. A Bohemian parallel enables me to explain that of masculinity by the belief in the influence of the sex of the ‘first foot’ upon that of the cattle to be born during the year[967]. I regret to add that there are traces also of a requirement that the ‘first foot’ should not be a priest, possibly because in that event the shadow of celibacy would make any births at all improbable[968].