Read "The Christmas Kalends of Provence" by Thomas A. Janvier online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
The creche, around which the children were gathered in a swarm, was built up in one corner; and our coming was the signal for the first of the ceremonies, the lighting of the creche candles, to begin. In this all the children had a part -- making rather a scramble of it, for there was rivalry as to which of them should light the most -- and in a moment a constellation of little flames covered the Bethlehem hill-side and brought into bright prominence the Holy Family and its strange attendant host of quite impossible people and beasts and birds.
The laying of the yule-log followed; a ceremony so grave that it has all the dignity of, and really is, a religious rite. The buzz of talk died away into silence as Elizo's father, the oldest man, took by the hand and led out into the court-yard where the log was lying his great-grandson, the little Tounin, the youngest child: it being the rule that the nominal bearers of the _cacho-fio_ to the hearth shall be the oldest and the youngest of the family -- the one personifying the year that is dying, the other the year new-born. Sometimes, and this is the prettiest rendering of the custom, the two are an old, old man and a baby carried in its mother's arms -- while between them the real bearers of the burden walk.