The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (2 page)

Pagans can do the same. Despite what you may have heard,

the old gods and goddesses are not so easy to pick out in

our modern festivities, but what a joy it is when you do spy one of them hanging around the punch bowl or riding in

with the mistletoe. Such a lengthy season demands a cast

of thousands, and witches, trolls and household sprites all have their parts to play. In these pages you will find elves aplenty, both Light Elves such as might be expected to have taken up employment as toymakers under the swaying curtain of the northern lights, and Dark Elves who lurk in

the forest, hiding their faces from the sun. I propose that Yule, and the days leading up to it, is the best time to contrast our more recent conception of these earthbound spir-

its with the more interactive relationship our ancestors had with them in the past.

There is a popular belief among both Pagans and non-

Pagans that Christmas as we know it is essentially a Pagan celebration, its rituals the richly dressed attempts of primal man to rekindle the dying embers of the sun. Though this

is a fine mythology in itself, it’s really only half the story.

Some of the creatures you’re about to meet are unabashedly heathen while others are the products of highly Christianized imaginations. The vast majority are some combination

of the two.

As you turn the pages of this book, I would like you to

feel as if you are forcing open an ancient church door to

find, not dusty pews, but an old growth forest, moonlight

glancing off the holly leaves as gauzy spirits dart among the boughs. I hope you, the reader, will be as surprised as I was at some of the discoveries I have made in the course of my own journey through this forest. At first glance, the Swedish Lucia, with her crown of lights and blood red sash, is a shoe-in for an ancient personification of—or sacrifice to—

the sun, but this turns out not to be the case. (On St. Lucy’s Day, you may also be surprised by what you find under

the Bohemian Lucy’s skirts!) Conversely, the Italian witch Befana, whose name means “Epiphany” and whose story

is inextricably bound up with that of the Three Kings who

brought gold, frankincense and myrrh to the Baby Jesus,

owes her existence as much to a Germanic goddess as to

Matthew:2.

There is no denying that Christmas is and always has

been largely about the choosing, buying, wrapping and pre-

sentation of gifts. The Roman Saturnalia, an early precursor of our own holiday, was marked by the exchange of candles, little clay dolls and other trinkets. Gift-giving is, after all, an expression of goodwill, especially when you are handing a little of your hard-earned cash back down the socio-

economic ladder. No, you don’t have to make merry, but

you ought to take the time to remember that we are all, as
4 Introduction

Scrooge’s nephew attempted to explain to his uncle, “fel-

low-passengers to the grave, and not another race of crea-

tures bound on other journeys.”

Which brings us, naturally, to the three Christmas

ghosts familiar to the whole world: those of Past, Present and Yet to Come.
A Christmas Carol
was neither the first nor the last Christmas ghost story Charles Dickens wrote.

Nor did he invent the genre; he brought an already estab-

lished storytelling tradition to new heights. Christmas and the spirit world were so closely linked in Dickens’ imagination that he saved up his spookiest ideas for publication in December.

In the forging of our own bright, shiny American

Christmas, certain attitudes, beliefs and practices have been clipped away, for that is the nature of tradition. Some customs might survive for centuries while others bite the dust under the Christmas tree skirt almost as soon as they are

born. Rather than let those old clippings lie in a heap on Santa’s workshop floor, I have gathered a handful of them

up and held their rough edges to the light. Take a look.

While I cannot with any confidence promise you a merry

Christmas, I can offer you the prospect of a very interesting one. Many of you may be of the opinion that Christmas

is all about the kids. I disagree; Christmas is all about safely
scaring
the kids and sometimes ourselves in the process.

The Christmas season used to stretch all the way from

late October to February 2. It should be noted that, while the broom-toting Barborky appear predictably on St. Barbara’s Eve (December 3) and La Befana can be counted on

to sweep through the sky with her sack of toys on Epiph-

any Eve (January 5), there are few hard and fast rules when it comes to the order of this otherworldly procession. If I have placed a certain occurrence in a certain province on

Christmas Eve, it does not mean that a similar ritual might not take place on New Year’s Eve or Twelfth Night somewhere else. In the early Middle Ages, the Christmas season was reckoned to begin on November 1, but keep in mind

that the medievals’ November 1 was not our November 1.2

What we now call Halloween was, for the ancient Celts, the night preceding the start of the winter half of the year and therefore a sort of New Year’s Eve. And for the Anglo-Saxons, what we call the beginning of winter was “midwinter.”

As in my first book,
Night of the Witches: Folklore, Traditions and Recipes for Celebrating Walpurgis Night
, many of the uncanny creatures you’ll meet are Germanic in origin.

But folk beliefs and traditions, like the people who create 2. The 365 day year with which we are all familiar was invented by Julius Caesar, or someone working for him, in 46 BC. This is the

“Julian” or “Old Style” calendar. Because it does not take the earth
exactly
365 days to complete its revolution around the sun, over the centuries, a sort of seasonal drift occurred which not even the Julian leap year could correct. Final y, in 1582, Pope Gregory XIII, or someone working for him, removed ten days from the fall of that year and tinkered with the leap year system to create the “Gregorian” or “New Style” calendar. The Gregorian calendar, which offers us at least the hope of a white Christmas each year, was accepted higgledy-piggledy throughout the Western World over a period lasting from 1582 to 1923. This should help explain why December 13, 21 and 25 have all been hailed at one time as the date of the winter solstice. When you also take into account the ecclesiastical calendar, the landlords’ calendar, the Old Icelandic calendar, and the lunar calendar to which Easter obsti-nately clings, it’s a wonder that there is any consensus at all when it comes to our modern holidays.

6 Introduction

them, often flow smoothly one into another instead of falling into neat scholarly categories. Our journey into Christmas will also take us deep into Celtic, Italic, Baltic and Slavic lands. With such a wealth of characters on hand, one has to draw the line somewhere and I have chosen to draw

it around the Catholic and formerly Catholic countries of

northern and central Europe, including, of course, those

hotbeds of Christmas creepiness, Iceland and the British

Isles. There will also be the odd excursion to North Amer-

ica, though only in relation to Old World practices pre-

served there. That said, no book of Christmas ghouls would be complete without the Greek
kallikantzaroi
who slip uninvited down the chimney to cause havoc on Christmas

Eve. Although they belong to the Eastern Orthodox realm,

you will find them here too, along with a handful of more

northerly Christmas beasts (some naughty, others nice), the odd vampire, and a few unquiet child ghosts.

And what is Christmas without at least a sprig of some-

thing green? Now more than ever, Christmas is a hothouse

holiday. Before the advent of the poinsettia, Christmas cactus and overblown Yuletide cyclamen, humbler herbs had

pride of place in the window, at the altar and among the

decorations in the hal . Along with the hol y and the mis-

tletoe, you will encounter some of the more unusual, some-

times haunted, seasonal greens, including ivy, juniper, and black hellebore.

Rest assured that there is more to see here than a few

green wreaths, quaint witches and prettily glowing ghosts.

Few of the spirits you encounter will make your blood run

cold, for the aim of this book is to capture the mystery of
Introduction 7

Christmas, not to evoke full-blown horror. Stil , once you’ve read it, you’ll no longer dismiss that drumming on the

rooftop as reindeer hooves. When you hear tinkling bel s

and a gruff, “Ho
ho
,” you’ll be looking out for the Wild Hunt instead of Santa’s sleigh, and as soon as you turn your calendar page to December, you’ll be on the alert for the

thump of a broom, the rustle of straw or the brushing of

birch twigs against the window pane.

Just as this continually evolving thing we call Christmas

did not used to end on December 25, this book does not

end at the Conclusion. At the back you will find a “Calendar of Christmas Spirits and Spells” to help you both organize and extend your festivities. There you will find the whole season at a glance as well as a few extra otherworldly tidbits not found elsewhere in the book. In the glossary I have defined terms not elucidated in the text. These range from familiar words whose exact meanings might nevertheless

escape the reader, such as “distaff ” and “flue,” to terms with which the reader may not be familiar at all, such as “primstav” and “Ember Days.” The glossary is also the receptacle of my less pertinent musings which I have withheld from

the main text in order not to break the flow.

If you speak English, then you are used to dedicating your Thursdays to the Germanic god Thor. Because the gnome-like
nisse
and
tomten
who watched over Nordic farmsteads refused to work on Thursday nights, we might jump to the

conclusion that they were devotees of the thunder god.

Thor’s was always a popular cult, so it is possible that the wizened old fellows were his men, but first we should take a look at how the Norse, German and Anglo-Saxon peoples

reckoned their days. Just as all Jewish holidays begin at sun-down before the day they are marked on the calendar, Ger-

manic pagans counted their days from dusk to dusk instead

of from daybreak to daybreak, which is why many if not

most of the witches, ghosts and goblins in this book fetch up in the darkness preceding each saint’s feast day.

As soon as darkness has fallen on Thursday, “Thor’s

Day,” we enter “Friday Eve,” or, in the Germanic pagan

imagination, Frigga’s Eve. Frigga, who dwelt among the

other sky gods in Asgard, was queen to Odin’s king. She

9

10 A Thousand Years of Winter

was a little less promiscuous than the fertility goddess Freya and decidedly more interested in housekeeping, especially

the production of cloth. (This is not to say that Frigga and Freya were not two faces of the same goddess which is also a distinct possibility.) Frigga was present in the northern sky in the form of her distaff, a constellation more familiar to us moderns as Orion’s Belt. Spinning was forbidden on

Frigga’s Eve; an empty distaff next to a basket of full spools demonstrated to the goddess that you were a diligent sort

and could afford, like the nisse and tomten, to slack off for one night. But by Twelfth Night (January 6), you had better have spun all the wool and flax in the house, for when the Christmas season was over it would be time to set up

the big upright loom, at which time you must have enough

thread to warp it and start your weaving.

In Alpine lands, Frigga was known as Perchta, Berchta,

or Bertha, and her cult continued to flourish long after

the belief in goddesses had been swept under the straw.

To make it clear that she no longer claims deity status, she now often goes by “Frau,” meaning “Mrs.” She has also been called
Spinnstubenfrau
or “Spinning Room Lady.” In Scandinavia, the icy twinkling of Frigga’s distaff in the night sky was enough to keep the maids busy as bees, but elsewhere,

young spinners had to be reminded that the last thing the

goddess wanted to see when she peered in the window at

Epiphany was a cloud of unspun wool or flax languishing

on the distaff. In Germany, Austria and Switzerland there

were numerous tales of Frau Berchta trampling and even

setting fire to the half-spun fibers.

A Thousand Years of Winter 11

Though few of us do our own spinning these days, the

last three Thursdays preceding Christmas still belong to

Frau Berchta. She does not always put in an appearance

on these “Berchtl Nights” as they are known in parts of the Alps; she has servants for that. Mostly, these servants make a racket. Bavarian children, appointing themselves tempo-rarily to Frau Berchta’s service, used to run around throwing dry peas, beans and pebbles against the doors and

windows to remind everyone that Christmas was coming.

Because of the noise, these Thursdays were known in Ger-

many as the “Knocking Nights.” Homeowners rewarded

the children for driving the evil spirits out from under the eaves. If the children happened to disturb any witches in

the process they did not fear pursuit, for the witch would be compelled to stop and count all of the beans that had fallen in her dooryard before she could go after the perpetrators.

The White Bees Are Swarming

In the “Snow Queen,” when fat white snowflakes are swirl-

ing outside the window, the old grandmother tells little Kay and Gerda, “’Those are the white bees swarming there!’”