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Updated: May 22, 2025
Alègre!" as Marius and Esperit first casting some fagots of vine-branches on the bed of glowing coals placed the yule-log upon the fire. Instantly the vines blazed up, flooding the room with brightness; and as the yule-log glowed and reddened everybody cried Cacho-fiò, Bouto-fiò! Alègre! Alègre! again and again as though the whole of them together of a sudden had gone merry-mad!
They passed like drift cloud like the wrack scudding before a storm. They passed. All the long, hot summer day burned away like a Yule-log; the crimson of its close perished; I was left bent among the cool blue shades, over the pale and ashen gleams of its night. Prayers were over; it was bed-time; my co-inmates were all retired.
Indeed the practice of preserving a piece of the Yule-log of one year to light that of the next was observed by at least one family at Cheadle in Staffordshire down to the latter part of the nineteenth century.
By the time the grandfather's clock struck seven through a haze of holly, the Doctor had pokered the Yule-log into a frenzied shower of gold; apples and nuts were steadily disappearing from a basket by the Doctor's chair and the Doctor himself was relating an original Christmas tale of adventure, born of uncommon inspiration and excitement, to a huddled group with circular eyes and contented stomachs.
Indoors, there was no seeing clearly: the lamp hung from the ceiling in a ring of steam and smoke and everything lay black and tumbled. In the hearth, the yule-log lay blazing. The farmer's wife baked waffles and threw them in batches on the straw-covered floor. In one corner, under the light and wound from head to foot in tobacco-smoke, were the farm-hands, playing cards.
To-day, now, he is a little animated by the thought of the cheerful Christmas time, which, in our country of Provençe, is like a grand bonfire of joy lighted in the midst of winter; by remembrance of the departure for Mass at midnight; the church bedecked and luminous; the dark streets of the village full of people; then the long watch around the table; the three traditional flambeaux; the ceremony of the Yule-log; then the grand promenade around the house, and the sparkle of the burning wine.
Was it not Christmas Eve? Had we not been obliged by our duty to give up the delightful family gathering which reunites us yearly around the symbolic Yule-log? This year our mothers, our sisters, and our children were keeping up the time-honoured and pious custom alone. Why did not our larger family of to-day join in singing together around lighted fir-trees?
Yule-log, Catch fire! Joy! Joy! God gives us joy! Christmas comes! All good comes! May God give us grace to see the coming year, And if we are not more, may we not be less! As he ended his invocation he crossed himself, as did all the rest; and a great glad shout was raised of "Alègre!
The only thing besides, that I distinctly remember of him, was the point he made every Christmas of getting in the "Yule-log," a huge log which he had doubtless been saving out in chopping the wood-pile, big enough for a yoke of oxen to draw, and which he placed with a kind of ceremony and respect in the great kitchen fireplace.
The laying of the yule-log followed; a ceremony so grave that it has all the dignity of, and really is, a religious rite.
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