Exodus 23:19

Sweet presentation to the Lord as much as to say, Lord, it is all thine, and of thine own do I offer thee. - Perhaps this precept of not seething a kid in its mother's milk was added to prevent that heathenish custom, which, it is said some nations observed, who, at their harvest feast, performed this cruel and superstitious deed, by way of being lucky, as they called it, in the next year's harvest. I stop the Reader to ask, whether the idle and sinful practice, among some of our countrymen, of drinking to the apple-trees at Christmas, until, not unfrequently, many of them are drunk at the revel, did not originate from such a Pagan institution?