A thousand indications point to the fact that Christmas has incorporated into itself all these festivals, Greek, Roman and German, and given them a new meaning. The wild revels of the Bacchanalia, the Saturnalia and the Twelve Nights survive in a milder form in the merriment and jollity which mark the season of Christmas to-day. Christmas gifts themselves remind us of the presents that were exchanged in Rome during the Saturnalia. In Rome, it might be added, the presents usually took the form of wax tapers and dolls,--the latter being in their turn a survival of the human sacrifices once offered to Saturn. It is a queer thought that in our Christmas presents we are preserving under another form one of the most savage customs of our barbarian ancestors! The shouts of “Bona Saturnalia!” which the Roman people exchanged among themselves are the precursors of our “Merry Christmas!” The decorations and illuminations of our Christian churches recall the temples of Saturn, radiant with burning tapers and resplendent with garlands. The masks and mummeries which still survive here and there, even in the America of to-day, and which were especially prominent in the Middle Ages, were prominent also in the Saturnalian revels. And a large number of the legends, superstitions and ceremonials which have crystallized around the Christian festival in Europe and America are more or less distorted reminiscences of the legends, superstitions and ceremonials of the Twelve Nights of ancient Germany. CHAPTER V SILENUS, SATURN, THOR And now you may be tempted to ask, “What bearing has all this stuff about the pagan festivals upon the question of the identity of our old friend Santa Klaus?” I am coming to that. In every one of these festivals the leading figure was an old man, with a lot of white beard and white hair rimming his face. In the Bacchanalia the representative god was not the young Bacchus, but the aged, cheery and decidedly disreputable Silenus, the chief of the Satyrs and the god of drunkards. In the Saturnalia it was Saturn, a dignified and venerable old gentleman--the god of Time. In the Germanic feasts it was Thor, a person of patriarchal aspect, and a warrior to boot. Now, although the central figure of the Christian festival was the child-god--the Christ-Kindlein--none the less the influence of long pagan antecedents was too strong within the breast of the newly Christianized world to be readily dismissed. The tradition of hoary age as the true representative of the holiday period, a tradition, it will be seen, in which all pagan nations agreed, still remained smouldering under the ashes of the past. It burst into flame again when the past was too far back to be looked upon with dislike or disquietude by the Church. No longer did there seem to be any danger of a relapse into the religious errors of that past.