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These days many Christmas dinner tables feature a Yule log, often an iced cake. The tradition hails from ancient Scandinavia, where at Juul, or the Winter Solstice, people used to kindle large bonfires in honour of Thor.
In old England, on Christmas Eve it was a custom to drag a huge log to the hall of the manorial home, where it was lit with a piece of last year's Yule log. It was believed this smaller piece of wood when kept in a cellar would protect the home from fire. The flame of the Yule log was believed to burn out past wrongs. It was considered very bad luck if a squinting person, a flat-footed woman, or a bare-footed person entered the hall when the fire was burning.
One form of ancient Yule log was the Devonshire type called an ashton faggot, which was a bundle of ash sticks bound with nine ash hoops. On Christmas Eve farm labourers would drag the faggot by two horses to their master's house, where everyone, rich and poor, celebrated the day with sack races, apple bobbing and jumping for treacle cakes suspended from the ceiling. Whenever an ash hoop cracked open in the fire, the master had to provide a new bowl of cider.
In Cornwall, England, the log was called the mock, and today was a special holiday in which children could stay up till midnight and drink to the mock.
The Yule log
There was an old fellow named Claus
With a case of the mid-winter blahs.
Taught his reindeer to fly
So they took to the sky.
The taps on your roof may be paws.
-Unknown-
In 1856, President Franklin Pierce decorates the first White House Christmas tree.
