From What Do We Know?
by Arthur Machen
(January 2, 1927)
It is still Christmas, let it be remembered, and Christmas customs have not ceased to be topics of the day. And I am reminded of a curious old Welsh custom, which lingered well into my young days, which, for all I know, may still linger. Christmas in the very old days was one of the feasts on which the parish spent all they could afford on lights. There was a Holy Bush, a kind of forerunner of our Christmas Tree, with a reminiscence, perhaps, of the Burning Bush in the wilderness. This was set thick with tapers; the Rood Screen was starred with lights; all the altars and all the glowing images were ablaze with candles. And many lights burnt about the Crib; to simple village eyes accustomed to a dim tallow to get to bed by, if so much illumination as that, the church on Christmas morning must have been a place of splendour and glory, a paradise on earth.
Well, we know that all this sort of thing came to an end with Queen Mary, perhaps because that Sovereign was too much addicted to kindling certain candles of an infernal rather than a celestial nature. Queen Elizabeth, being of similar tastes to Mrs. Pardiggle, and liking her services prettily done, is said to have insisted on the altar in her private chapel being adorned with a crucifix and burning tapers; but, generally, we may say that the candles of the English Church were put out for the next three hundred years, and yet there remained in certain obstinate Welsh heads the lingering notion that at Christmas the parish church should be all ablaze with lights early on Christmas morning; and it may be conjectured that the earliness of the hour was a dim recollection of the Mass in the Night, commonly called Midnight Mass. “O God, Who hast made this most holy night to shine with the glory of the very Light,” so went the Collect, and the echo of it was still, seems, in the Welshmen’s ears. At all events, they rose very early, at three or four o’clock, from their farms and cabins on the hillside, and in the valley, and came into the dark church. And then everyone in the assembly drew out a candle and lit it, and one of them read aloud the Gospel stories of the Nativity. I do not think that the parish priest took any part in the ceremony. It was called Plygan, which means, I think, cock-crow. But I am nervous, for I know that Welsh eyes are on me.
There is another side of Christmas. Being the most joyful of seasons, it is, obviously, the time to talk of dreads and terrors, ghosts and goblins. This truism was recognized, I was glad to see by the people of East Barnes, and I congratulate the local night watchman on his spectre: a midnight figure, in a dusky cloak, through which a skeleton could be clearly seen. Here you have the genuine ghost of our forefathers, stark and simple, unspoilt by any “psychic” or literary subtleties. Dickens would have loved that phantasm. It is true that he would not have believed in the ghost, but he would have dearly hoped that other people credited every word of the tale. I think that he might have made a Christmas Book out of it, and I believe that a kindly and cheery moral would, somehow, have been found, lurking in the story.
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