Seventh, vain observance can sometimes occur in New Year’s gifts given on the first day of the year. The Gentiles were accustomed to celebrate the Kalends of January with great solemnity, as Suetonius and Ovid teach, in honor of Janus. Among other things they then gave one another New Year’s gifts, as an omen or good prayer that the year would pass prosperously, or that many other things would be added. For the word was said, as it were, from “three each,” and the number three was regarded as an indicator of perfection and fullness, because Aristotle says there are three omens.
Because of superstitions of this kind, the Council of Auxerre calls these gifts diabolical, and those who send them seem to be condemned by St. Augustine in Gratian and by Pope Martin, who says: “It is not lawful to practice the wicked observances of the Kalends and to spend time in songs; nor to crown houses with laurel or the greenery of trees. For all this observance belongs to pagans.”
Devout Christians were formerly accustomed to fast on that day in detestation of Gentile superstition, as we are taught by St. Ambrose and the Fourth Council of Toledo. Those who, in contempt of the fast, kept the feast day with the pagans were anathematized by the Roman council under Pope Zacharias.
Therefore, if anyone today were to spend time in feasts in honor of Janus or the goddess Strenia, or to send or receive New Year’s gifts for that reason, he would be an idolater. If he did it only as a certain omen of a prosperous outcome, it would be vain observance mixed with divination, for the most part mortal. If he did it only as an uncertain omen or augury, it would be a venial sin. If he did it only for pleasure or for the sake of preserving friendship, according to the custom of Christians, it would be no sin. Indeed, if he did it in honor of the Lord’s circumcision, which the Church then celebrates, he would deserve well before God. For today the obsolete superstitions of the Gentiles have ceased, which were the cause of so strict a sanction in the canons.
Yet even today those superstitions must be avoided about which Burchard writes in this way: “Have you observed the Kalends of January according to the rite of the pagans, so that you did something more because of the new year than you were accustomed to do before or after? I mean this: if you prepared your table with stones or feasts in your house at that time; or led singers and dances through the streets and public ways; or sat around the roof of your house armed with your sword, so that there you might see and understand what would happen to you in the following year; or sat on a bull’s hide at a crossroads, so that there too you might understand future things for yourself; or if you caused breads to be baked on the aforesaid night in your name, so that, if they rose well and became thick and high, you would thereby foresee prosperity for your life that year. Therefore, because by doing these things you have abandoned God your Creator and turned yourself toward idols and those vanities, and have become an apostate, you shall do penance for two years on the lawful ferias.”
So Burchard writes in the Penitential, book 19, chapter on magical art, under the words “Have you observed the Kalends?” There you have a brief enumeration of the superstitions of that day. It is clear that they have no likeness to today’s sending of New Year’s gifts. Where the text says “stones,” perhaps it should be corrected to “delicacies.”
I had no more convenient place to insert this, although I judge that some sacrilege lies beneath it: the wild Irish hold wolves in great honor and count them among their kinsmen. They call them “dear ones of Christ,” pray for them, and bless them, and in this way do not fear being harmed by them. Camden narrates this in the Antiquities of Britain.
[margin: canon “It is not lawful,” cause 26, question 5, and canon “Do not observe”; Silvester under “superstition,” question 10; Burchard, cited chapter 7, question 3; Binsfeld, confession of harmful-magicians, third dispositive cause]