Februa Candlemas has been celebrated as a Church festival for
some 1,500 years (and as a law festival in Scotland for very many years), and perhaps more directly than any other adopted from a pagan predecessor. Our months mostly derive from Roman gods, or near gods as our week-days from Northern gods ; and February is more Roman gods, most. Lights were lit—or candles so called burnt—in honour to Februa, the mother of Mars—perhaps a thousand years before the Roman Catholic Church organised candle processions. February was, of course, once the last month of the old year, not the second of the new, and Ovid regretted that the year did not begin with the spring. This year, even if winter is still to come (and some of us remember skating on March 17th), we did at any rate begin to taste spring somewhere about January 1st.
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