Literal Translation
Christmas on the balcony, Easter by the fire
Actual Meaning
If Christmas is warm, Easter will be cold
Etymology
This is part of the large family of weather sayings. In the past, every religious holiday, every saint, and every month of the year was given a weather or agricultural saying that conveyed a lesson or observation drawn from experience: « S’il pleut à l’Ascension, tout va à perdition », « À la Sainte-Simone (28 octobre), il faut avoir rentré ses pommes », « S’il gèle à la Saint-Gontran (28 mars), le blé ne deviendra pas grand »’… Of this rich collection of advice and lessons passed down orally from one generation to the next, only a very small number of weather sayings have survived in everyday language: ‘In April, don’t take off a single thread…’, ‘If it rains on Saint-Médard’s Day (8 June), it will rain forty days later’ and, of course, our famous ‘Christmas on the balcony, Easter by the fire’.
The first mention of this saying can be found in Cotgrave’s bilingual French-English dictionary, dated 1611, in the form ‘À Noël au perron, à Pasques au tison’ (Christmas on the porch, Easter by the fire).
However, its wording probably dates back to the 16th or even the 15th century, when many weather sayings became established. As for the very idea of passing on empirical knowledge about temperatures and field work, its origins can be traced back to Works and Days by the ancient Greek poet Hesiod, who, in the 8th century BC, was the first to condense a set of valuable laws and advice for agriculture into poetic form.
In 1690, Furetière’s dictionary further clarified the meaning of this teaching: ‘To say that winter is far off and that we will be warming ourselves at Easter if we go for walks at Christmas.’ A mild Christmas therefore brings the certainty of a late winter, which leads to a shift in temperatures, inviting caution when working in the fields until Easter. As Easter can fall between 22 March and 25 April, depending on the year, we can assume that the earlier this holiday occurred, the more certain the saying was to prove true.