Saint's day customs that never made it into the history books
Folk observances at the margins of official religion — and why they still matter.
The feast of St Martin falls on the eleventh of November, and in the villages of Lower Austria it is still observed in a way that has nothing to do with the saint and everything to do with geese. The goose must be roasted. The wine must be new. The lantern procession must go around the church at least twice. Nobody is entirely sure why twice; it has always been twice.
These are the customs that historians of religion tend to overlook, because they fit neither the narrative of Christian practice nor the narrative of its decline. They are too specific to be universal, too local to be canonical, too persistent to be dismissed as superstition.
I have spent several years collecting accounts of such observances from across the German-speaking world and its borderlands. What I have found is a body of practice that is simultaneously very old and very adaptive — customs that have survived not by being rigid but by being useful.
Useful in what sense? Useful in the sense that they mark time. They give the calendar a texture that the secular year lacks. They provide occasions for gathering that need no further justification than tradition itself — which is, as any anthropologist will tell you, the most powerful justification of all.