CHRISTMAS VS SPIRITS
Is Christmas the most fortean day of the year? Certainly, our ancestors thought it was a thin time, when the line between this and the other world faded away, almost to nothing. A particularly striking example of this are the beliefs around animals (domestic and (the Julian not the Gregorian), which had been done away with in England and Wales in 1752. I find it incredible, but as late as the 1830s, 80 years after the change, we have references to rustics keeping the ‘proper’ Christmas!
