See this long excerpt from one of my post on the thread.cfm?threadid=78748#1419907
which documents the New Year's tradition that considered [considers?]it to be an omen of good luck to meet up with sooty faced chimney sweep:

"Subject: RE: Padstow Darkie Days
From: Azizi - PM
Date: 04 Mar 05 - 11:53 PM

Here's a bit of information that seems to explain why kissing a chimney sweep was considered lucky.

"A chimney sweep's lucky as lucky can be..."
Many people will be able to sing along with that song from the Walt Disney version of Mary P. Travers' "Mary Poppins," but not as many know that In Germany, Austria, Hungary, and contiguous regions, the chimney sweep is considered a particularly auspicious omen of good luck if you meet with him on New Year's Day.

The postcard shown here is inscribed in Hungarian "Boldog Ujevet" (which, according to reader Marcell Revisnyei, means "Happy New Year"). It was postally used on January 1st, 1938. It is typical of Central and Eastern European New Year's postcards in which a chimney sweep -- often a blond child -- is shown frolicking in the snow, tossing out lucky talismans by the basketful.

The imagery on this card is unusual to American eyes because the slipshod young chimney sweep is not only sprinkling the ground with four-leaf clovers, he is equally generous in his distribution of toxic red and white Amanita muscaria mushrooms. This is not as strange as it seems, however, for while the four-leaf clover is considered lucky throughout Europe and North America, the Amanita muscaria or "gluckpilz" ("lucky mushroom" in German) is deemed fortuitous in Central and Eastern Europe, where there are remnants of respect for its ancient use as a shamanic hallucinogen.

When i asked my mother Lilo Glozer, who was born in Germany, about the chimney sweep as a bringer of New Year's luck, she replied:

New Year's was not celebrated in Germany until the l7th century, according to an old book I have on German folklore, so originally, this took place on Christmas or Saint Nicholas' Day, but anyway, gifts were given on New Year's Day to people who delivered bread or did household chores that were not performed by live-in servants. In exchange, these purveyors of services often handed out little cards with a blessing or good wishes.

Meeting a chimney sweep -- called a Schornsteinfeger or Schlotfeger --at New Year's meant good luck for the year, especially if he would give you his card. However, by the time my sister and I were children, in the 1910s and 1920s, chimney sweeps were sufficiently rare that meeting one at any time of the year was considered lucky.

Chimney sweeps can also be found in the form of silver bracelet charms, small figurines, Good Luck Semi-Sweet Chocolate labels like the one shown here (which also depicts a lucky horseshoe), and even edible mid-winter gifts in which the chimney sweep's body is made of dried prunes.

Other European postcards in my collection show chimney sweeps giving people money bags, riding in toboggans with lucky pigs, and strewing about prodigious amounts of four-leaf clovers and Amanita muscaria mushrooms.

Perhaps i am fingerpainting here, but i see in this sooty New year's mushroom-bringer the folkloric remains of a shamanic Winter Solstice tradition now long lost to history. "

This article is accompanied by a photo here http://www.luckymojo.com/chimneysweep.html

[This hyperlink was given as "Luck and Chimney Sweeps" in my post]

****

This is an example of how historical information found on the Internet can be used to help explain present day customs..

The photo that accompanies this article is of a white faced blond haired boy. It's interesting to note that in this article the chimney sweep was not considered lucky because of a 'sooty face' but because of the good luck charms that he distributed.

Certainly one article is not good research. But if the tradition of the chimney sweep emphasized the distribution of good luck charms more than the 'skin color' of the sweep, how did the color become more dominant as my readings thus far of the modern day customs suggests? Are there other articles that might support a belief that 'black' color itself was good luck? This would be counter to the tradition in the United States, at least, that [for instance] seeing a black cat is bad luck...But am I correct that in financial terms, 'being in the black' is good? And Europe does have Chritian traditions of Black Madonnas..[which may or may not have anything to do with this guising tradition]

In summary, as a result of reading this one article on chimney sweeps, I have a better understanding of the reasons behind the traditional custom of blackening up. The chimney sweep explanation sounds more believable to me than the disguise explanation [which as I understand it from this and other Mudcat threads is that lower class people who were going door to door begging at a particular time [New Years?]used cork to blacken their faces as a means of disguising themselves from their upper class masters. However, it seems possible to me that the black face disguise explanation/customs were grafted onto the older chimney sweep good luck traditions"...