Page:Cornish feasts and folk-lore.djvu/19

 and even some people who are in the receipt of weekly charity call, as a matter of course, for their Christmas cakes. The cakes must not be cut until Christmas-day, it being probably "unlucky to eat them sooner."—(Geo. C. Boase, Notes and Queries, 5th series, Dec. 21st, 1878.)

The materials to make these and nearly all the cakes at this season were at one time given by the grocers to their principal customers.

In Cornwall, as in other English counties, houses are at Christmas "dressed up" with evergreens, sold in small bunches, called "Penn'orths of Chris'mas"; and two hoops fastened one in the other by nails at the centres are gaily decorated with evergreens, apples, oranges, &c., and suspended from the middle beam in the ceiling of the best kitchen. This is the "bush," or "kissing bush." At night a lighted candle is put in it, stuck on the bottom nail; but once or twice lately I have seen a Chinese lantern hanging from the top one.

In a few remote districts on Christmas-eve children may be, after nightfall, occasionally (but rarely) found dancing around painted lighted candles placed in a box of sand. This custom was very general fifty years ago. The church towers, too, are sometimes illuminated. This of course, on the coast can only be done in very calm weather. The tower of Zennor church (Zennor is a village on the north coast of Cornwall, between St. Ives and St. Just) was lit up in 1883, for the first time since 1866.

When open chimneys were universal in farmhouses the Christmas stock, mock, or block (the log), on which a rude figure of a man had been chalked, was kindled with great ceremony; in some parts with a piece of charred wood that had been saved from the last year's "block." A log in Cornwall is almost always called a "block." "Throw a block on the fire."

Candles painted by some member of the family were often lighted at the same time.

The choir from the parish church and dissenting chapels go from house to house singing "curls" (carols), for which they are given money or feasted; but the quaint old carols, "The first good joy that Mary had," "I saw three ships come sailing in," common forty years ago, are now never heard. The natives of Cornwall have been