Scary Solstice

I recently read a lavishly illustrated book about midwinter folklore, THE FRIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS, by Jeff Belanger, featuring Krampus, the Yule Cat, Belsnickel, and many other Christmas-season monsters; however, it also covers some benevolent creatures such as La Befana, Saint Nicholas, and of course Santa Claus. Terrors lurk in the longest, darkest night at the coldest time of year. In the past, telling frightful tales at Christmas was a British tradition. Even now, a popular Christmas song mentions "scary ghost stories" along with caroling in the snow. Dickens's A CHRISTMAS CAROL is just the best known. Our preindustrial ancestors recognized the frightening aspect of midwinter; that's why the lights, fires, bells, feasting, and evergreens exist in the first place. They ward off the darkness and keep the demons at bay. Some of the Yuletide boogeymen used to serve as shadow counterparts of Saint Nicholas, punishing naughty children while he rewarded nice ones, in a sort of bad cop / good cop partnership.

Nowadays we joke about getting coal in stockings from Santa if we haven't been "good" (sometimes with the contemporary angle that coal might be a reward instead of a punishment when energy costs rise). Saint Nick's old-style sidekicks or substitutes, though, would beat naughty children with sticks, haul them away in sacks to an unspecified fate, or eat them. On the other hand, if you're lucky you might get a visit from the Italian witch Befana, who may sweep your house in addition to leaving gifts for children. The animated film THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS beautifully highlights the traditional solstice ambiguity of the festive combined with the monstrous. Likewise, in Terry Pratchett's HOGFATHER Death himself fills in for the Hogfather (Discworld's Santa) when the latter is temporarily unavailable.

A long time ago in an online writing group, I read a story about an alternate world in which Santa is a frightening figure who comes down the chimney at midwinter to perpetrate terrible acts. From a certain point of view, a mysteriously omniscient man who constantly watches you from afar and sneaks into your house in the middle of the night regardless of locked doors DOES sound sinister.

Ellen Datlow's new anthology CHRISTMAS AND OTHER HORRORS explores the dark side of the winter solstice in a variety of stories featuring Christmas and other seasonal celebrations and customs. Some of the horrors are based on actual folklore, others created by the individual authors.

Speaking of HOGFATHER, here's a link to my favorite quote from the entire Discworld series, Death's explanation of why human beings need myths and fantasies:

We Need Fantasy to Be Human

Margaret L. Carter

Please explore love among the monsters at Carter's Crypt.

The Monsters of Christmas

On Facebook I came across a link to an article about the dark side of the Christmas season in many European folk traditions. It includes some creepy illustrations:

Why Monsters Haunt Christmas in Europe

The page describes Black Piet, Krampus, Belsnickel, and several other horrifying creatures that roam the world around the time of the winter solstice. It quotes some observations by Stephen Nissenbaum, author of my favorite nonfiction book about the holiday season, THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS. Before the nineteenth-century reforms that converted the REAL "old-fashioned Christmas" into a family-centered occasion for giving presents to children, Yuletide was "a disorderly time" dedicated to celebrating the post-harvest leisure period with feasting, drinking, making noise, wassailing (begging from door to door), and dressing up in grotesque costumes. In this period of "misrule," the social order often got turned upside down, with ritual defiance of authority. A tamer remnant of that pattern, mentioned by Nissenbaum, survives in the custom of officers in the British Army waiting on enlisted men on Boxing Day / St. Stephen's Day (December 26), as depicted in one Christmas episode of the TV series MASH.

Works that showcase the scary side of Christmas include the movie NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS and Terry Pratchett's Discworld novel HOGFATHER, in which Death has to substitute for the vanished Hogfather (that world's Santa figure). Not surprisingly, Death's idea of a suitable winter holiday is a bit odd. This book, by the way, has been filmed:

Hogfather Movie

Here's a page devoted to all things Krampus, where you can find, among other features, a list of cities that hold Krampus celebrations:

Krampus

On reflection, it's obvious that grim figures such as Black Piet serve a useful purpose in the celebration of Christmas. If St. Nicholas has a dark sidekick who punishes naughty children, Santa himself doesn't have to bear the burden of the punitive role implied by "he knows if you've been bad or good." Instead, he can be the completely benevolent gift-dispenser.

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt

Alien Holidays

Cultures in the non-tropical regions of our planet typically celebrate seasonal holidays such as lights, fire, evergreens, and feasting at the winter solstice; harvest festivals and tributes to the dead in the fall; rituals welcoming spring, e.g., Easter and May Day (as well as advance preparations for the return of spring, such as Carnival and Lent); etc. Heather Rose Jones's Alpennia series takes place in an imaginary country in a version of our Europe. In addition to familiar holidays, the capital city marks the changing of seasons by measuring when the river rises to a certain level. What kinds of holidays might be celebrated on worlds that don't have seasons like ours at all? Come to think of it, why do the Fraggles in the animated series FRAGGLE ROCK have a midwinter festival of bells? They live in a giant cavern complex, where the climate should stay uniform all year round, and they don't have a view of sun, moon, or stars to mark the cycle of the year. (Yeah, I know, because the writers wanted a sort-of Christmas episode, and I loved it, but in-universe the episode lacks logic.)

On a planet where the main division of the year's climate falls between wet and dry, the onset of the rainy season—the time of fertility—might be an occasion for a major holiday. On Marion Zimmer Bradley's Darkover, which has four moons, some festivals coincide with the appearance of all four moons in the sky. Earth cultures mark months and weeks by phases of the moon, and some cultures follow a lunar rather than a solar year. How would the calendar of a world with no moon look? Without weeks in our sense, what method would societies use to set aside days of rest? Or consider a world like the planet in Isaac Asimov's classic story "Nightfall," with several suns. On that world, total darkness occurs only at intervals of over a millennium. With no memory of night and stars except in mythology, people go mad from the unprecedented sight, and civilization collapses at every "nightfall." But suppose darkness happened rarely but not all that rarely, say roughly once a year. The peoples of that world might have holidays to get them through that frightening occurrence, just as ancient cultures on Earth held rituals and celebrations to ensure that the sun would return on the winter solstice. Other kinds of worlds might have holidays centered on the periodic eruption of a geyser, the migration of important species of animals, or the blooming of a special tree. In our own culture we have celebrations such as the Cherry Blossom Festival and (in my home city in Virginia) the spring Azalea Festival. Capistrano honors the return of the swallows.

The STEVEN UNIVERSE animated series (Cartoon Network) takes place in an alternate world similar to ours but with divergences in history and geography caused by the Gem War (an alien invasion) thousands of years in the past. The characters live in Beach City in the state of Delmarva, for instance. According to the show's creator, this world has no Christmas. We've seen that there's no Halloween. (From these clues, we must assume no Christianity and therefore no Easter either.) Apparently they also don't have Thanksgiving. Other than local town celebrations, we don't yet know what holidays they do celebrate. Because they live in a temperate zone with changing seasons, though, we have to expect them to observe some holidays analogous to the ones we know.

Terry Pratchett's HOGFATHER takes place at the season of Hogswatch, Discworld's analog of Christmas. At the winter solstice the Hogfather brings toys to good children in a sleigh pulled by giant boars. People leave sausages instead of cookies for him, in keeping with the origin of Yuletide as a all-out orgy of feasting before the privations of winter. At the climax of the novel, Susan, Death's part-human granddaughter (it's complicated), has to save the original Hogfather, the primal being on whom the myth is based, from permanent annihilation. Death tells Susan that if she had failed, the sun would not have risen. When she asks what would have happened instead, he says, "A mere ball of flaming gas would have illuminated the world." It's also Death who tells us, in the same scene, "Humans need fantasy to be human."

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt