People in the north of England used to believe that bees congregated on Christmas Eve to hum holiday hymns—presumably after flying to church. It is a delightful image, and I’d love to listen in. But since we don’t see enough bees in the Hamptons in December to form a choral group, I suspect this tradition relates more to the drinking of excessive amounts of mead, an English wine fermented from honey.
I checked to see what bees do in the winter outside of choir practice, and it turns out that some species hibernate, some hide out in the hive, and some migrate.
Scandinavians used to believe that the dead visit the living on Christmas Eve. This Protestant conviction is similar an ancient Catholic one, where the dead visit on All Souls Eve, now our secular Halloween. Before going to bed, devout Scandinavians left their houses ready for company, clean, the candlelit table replete with food, wine and Yule ale for the comfort of the visiting dead. Piety crossed with empiricism however when chairs were wiped down in the evening and then again in the morning to see if any earth from the grave had been left.
