In the Bleak Midwinter

Merry Christmas!

Recommended: A 2024 book about the dark side of the winter holidays, THE DEAD OF WINTER, by Sarah Clegg, subtitled "Beware of Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures." It's an entertainingly readable blend of historical and folkloric scholarship with a casual, conversational tone.

Once upon a time, Saint Nicholas devoted much more attention than nowadays to chastising the naughty children as well as rewarding the nice. Rather early in his history, though, he acquired minions to take over the harsher aspects of his gift-giving role. Other scary creatures lurk in the cold months of the northern hemisphere, too.

The chapters begin with anecdotes about the author's personal visits to locations associated with the creatures and customs surveyed in the respective chapters. She continues with a detailed examination of the history and significance of each topic. Her wry, often funny footnotes remind me somewhat of Terry Pratchett's Discworld novels. Maybe it's a British thing? The book includes an index, endnotes, and a selected bibliography for each chapter.

The introduction, "The Year Walk," narrates the author's visit to a graveyard on Christmas Eve to enact a ritual for glimpsing shadows of the future. Chapter One, Lords of Misrule: How the chaotic, transgressive revelry of Carnival migrated to the Twelve Days of Christmas. Chapter Two, Monstrous Visitors: Mummers' plays and house-to-house "guising" as fearsome monsters begging for drinks and other treats. Chapter Three, Horse Skulls and Hoodenings: Wassailing and the Welsh Mari Lwyd (yes, a person wearing or carrying a horse's skull) and related creatures. Chapter Four, Punishing the Wicked: Krampus and his child-snatching, often cannibalistic kin. Chapter Five, The Christmas Witches: Befana and less benign female prowlers of winter nights, including, surprisingly, a dark side of Saint Lucy. Chapter Six, Old Gods: The solstice rituals at Stonehenge, leading into a discussion of efforts, often mistaken, to trace surviving seasonal beliefs and customs back to ancient pagan deities and rites, by scholars such as the Grimm brothers and James Frazer (author of THE GOLDEN BOUGH). The epilogue explores possible reasons for the Victorian pleasure in ghost stories at Yuletide and the "modern embrace of the darker side of Christmas."

Also, for related entertainment, take a look at this Extra Mythology video (part of the Extra Credits series) compiling all their previous animated short podcasts on Christmas creatures, including Krampus and several others, plus a discussion of Dickens's A CHRISTMAS CAROL:

Extra Mythology Christmas Stories

Margaret L. Carter

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

Anti-Santas

Nowadays almost everybody has heard of Krampus, the goatlike humanoid creature from central Europe who accompanies Saint Nicholas to punish naughty children:

Krampus

Yuletide legends of various regions, however, include many other scary figures who perform this "bad cop" function in contrast to Saint Nicholas's "good cop" role of bringing gifts to well-behaved children. The Christmas gift-giver, apparently, has often been split into two entities so that Santa can be conceived as kind and generous rather than punitive. Not that our modern concept of him is totally free from the latter trait: "He see you when you're sleeping. . . .he knows when you've been bad or good, so be good for goodness' sake." In Germany, Knecht Ruprecht (who might have evolved from a folkloric image of the Devil, according to some scholars) leaves coal and switches for bad children or sometimes hits them with the bag of ashes he carries. The Dutch Zwarte Piet ("Black Pete"), perhaps originally a kobold or a captured demon, sometimes distributes sweets to good children as well as switches to bad ones but often serves mainly as the "bad cop" to leave the benign role to Saint Nick. "Black" could refer to the soot covering his body, but some traditions depict him as racially Black, a detail that has made this Christmas henchman controversial. Belsnickel, also from Germany, combines gift-giving and punishment-dispensing functions. He traveled to Pennsylvania with German immigrants. In France, Père Fouettard carries a whip to punish naughty boys and girls. One legend gruesomely describes his origin as a butcher who killed and chopped up children; after repenting, he had to do penance by becoming the assistant of Saint Nicholas.

This Wikipedia entry discusses several dark or ambiguous personages who accompany Saint Nick in European legends:

Companions of Saint Nicholas

THE FRIGHT BEFORE CHRISTMAS (2023), an entertainingly written and profusely illustrated book by Jeff Belanger, collects the lore of a wide variety of "Yuletide monsters."

The Fright Before Christmas

In the Zwarte Piet tradition, some folksongs warn that as the assistant of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) he may carry off naughty kids in his sack to Sinterklaas's workshop, where they're forced to toil for an indefinite period of servitude. Coincidentally, before having come across this bit of lore, last week I posted this twisted-Santa flash fiction on my website:

You Better Watch Out

Margaret L. Carter

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