Although we know of no historical basis for commemorating the birth of Christ on December 25th, the date, nonetheless, has a strong symbolic value. Three days after the winter solstice, the darkest time of the solar year, it is the first day on which the cycle is "re-born" from darkness, and begins to move slowly towards the light. The 12 days that follow are known in some cultures as the "days of fate", each of them, it is said, symbolically governing the meteorological character of the month that occupies the corresponding place for the succeeding year.
Gervase Markham, a contemporary of William Shakespeare and himself a writer of prose and poetry of some considerable skill, described it thus in The English Husband- man: "What the weather shall be on the sixth and twentieth day of December, the like shall it be in the month of January: what it shall be on the seventh and twentieth, the like shall be the following February, and so on until the Twelfth Day, each day's weather foreshowing a month of the year." An equally reliable, but more general, guide to the character of the year to come, however, is the day of the week on which the Christmas falls. In this case an interpretative text has been provided in the form of a lengthy rhyme of uncertain but very ancient origin, which sets out all seven options. The predictions for glorious year of 1995, for example, were encouraging, and indeed in retrospect, quite accurate: Lordlings, all of you I warn
That if the day that Christ
was born
Fall on a Sunday, then
The winter shall be good,
and nigh,
The summer shall be fair
and dry.
The outlook for 1996 and 1997 was much less optimistic, even dismal, and by and large that is more or less how things turned out to be. But then I hear you say, all that is history - so let me leave you with best wishes for the festive season and the poet's predictions for 1998, complete and unabridged: If Christmas day on
Thursday be
A windy winter you shall see;
Stormy weather in each week
And frequent tempests,
strong and thick.
The summer shall be good
and dry
And corn and beasts shall multiply;
The year is good for lands for
to till
And crops abundant, barns
shall fill.
A child who that day born
should be,
Will be a happy child, I tell
thee;
Of deeds, he shall be good
and stable,
Wise of speech and
reasonable;
And if sickness should that
day betide,
It shall most quickly from
thee glide.