In the week before Christmas poor women carried two dolls, dressed as the Christ child and the Virgin Mary, about the country, and expected a halfpenny for showing them. To refuse was thought the height of ill luck. The bearers sang a carol of the joys of Mary, and the custom was also called going about with a vessel-cup, a corruption of wassail-cup. In Yorkshire a single image of the Christ child was carried in a box of evergreens and flowers, and a leaf or flower taken from it was kept as a sovereign cure for toothache.
The Advent images
19 December · Yorkshire
No longer kept
during the week before Christmas they are carried about the country by poor women, who, in return for their exhibition, expect a halfpenny, which it is considered as insuring the height of ill-luck to deny.
From Chambers's Book of Days, vol. 2, p. 725. Read the original
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