Star Singers
In Austria, Belgium and Germany, Christmas is celebrated by some with children dressing as "The Three Kings", carrying a star on a pole. Going from house to house from New Year's Day to January 6, the children sing religious songs and are called "star singers". They are often rewarded with sweets or money, which is typically given to a local church or charity. "C.M.B" is written in chalk on houses they have visited. Although this is sometimes taken as a reference to the three kings — Caspar, Melchior and Balthasar — it may originally have represented the words "Christus mansionem benedicat" (Christ bless this house).
Read more about this topic: Christmas Carol
Famous quotes containing the words star and/or singers:
“Exhaust them, wrestle with them, let them not go until their blessing be won, and, after a short season, the dismay will be overpast, the excess of influence withdrawn, and they will be no longer an alarming meteor, but one more brighter star shining serenely in your heaven, and blending its light with all your day.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“O you singers solitary, singing by yourself, projecting me,
O solitary me listening, never more shall I cease perpetuating you
Never more shall I escape, never more the reverberations,
Never more the cries of unsatisfied love be absent from me,
Never again leave me to be the peaceful child I was before what
there in the night,
By the sea under the yellow and sagging moon,
The messenger there aroused, the fire, the sweet hell within,
The unknown want, the destiny of me.”
—Walt Whitman (1819–1892)