Arminel of the West Author:Ernest George Henham Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: CHAPTER III. CONCERNING GIGLET FAIR. The least romantic month of the year is December. November in mid-Devon finds the foliage still upon the trees, the br... more »acken golden, a few late flowers in the lanes, a bunch or two of sodden blackberries, sometimes a ripe strawberry. But December, in the words of Bacon, "mars all." In January Nature does not awake, but she moves, her breathing is heard, and consciousness is suggested by the snowdrop and the primrose. There is more romance in one gleam of Spring sunshine than in all Christmas-tide. Christmas is a failure as a holiday. It is the saddest time of the year, and that is why so many Christmas stories have been written. No stories are written about Easter-tide. It is Spring then, wet and cold perhaps, but still Spring, and Romance is alive again, and no stories are required. That is why a pleasure fair at Christmas is a failure. It comes at the wrong time. There is no romance about it. Young people must have sunshine for a fair. Their blood must be warmed, not chilled. There must be an air of abandon, a surrender of self to pleasure which is not necessarily evil. The Spring and Autumn fairs of Devonshire are not degenerating. On the contrary, they have improved very much during recent years, although there are many who would abolish them altogether, as the village dance and the Maypole were abolished. Nobody who knows the origin of the Maypole could wish to see its ancient rites revived; but the modern pleasure fair has no Pagan symbolism. The contrary rather, for it was originally a Church holiday, and as such wasdedicated to some saint. There is the fair of St. Thomas at Exeter, for instance. The saint is still solicited for his patronage, although the religious idea has been decidedly lost sight of. It would not be easy to i...« less