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.

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.

A World Without Christmas

The Hallmark channel has already begun its annual Countdown to Christmas movie marathon. For us (Episcopalians) the season runs from the first Sunday of Advent (early December) to Epiphany (January 6, aka Twelfth Night), and I keep the tree up at least until Epiphany. But starting before Halloween?!

Last Saturday night, I watched WHERE ARE YOU, CHRISTMAS? The protagonist wishes Christmas didn't exist and wakes up from a minor car crash to discover she's got her wish. She finds herself in an alternate reality where nobody else has heard of the holiday.

Does the script take into account any of the implications of a world with no Christmas? If they even thought of that aspect at all, they didn't bother, maybe to avoid complications that would distract from the theme of rediscovering the joy of the holiday. No Christmas implies no Jesus and no Christianity, a change that would make the history of Europe, Britain, and the Americas almost unrecognizable. As far as religion is concerned, you'd have Judaism, Asian religions such as Hinduism and Buddhism, and modern-day versions of the various pagan cults. As for Islam, I conjecture it might not exist without Christianity, at least in a form we'd easily recognize. So we should see pagan temples all over the place and people celebrating Saturnalia and/or Yuletide. (Earth's history as portrayed in the cartoon series STEVEN UNIVERSE takes this sort of thing seriously. There's no Christianity, so we don't see Christmas, Halloween, or Valentine's Day.)

For a less drastic point of divergence from actual history, suppose the Reformation as a whole concurred with the Puritan belief that the feast of the Nativity shouldn't be celebrated because it's merely a Christian veneer over a pagan festival, and the Catholic Counter-Reformation adopted that position, too. In that case, we can imagine Christmas being abandoned in the early modern era. Therefore, some people would recognize the word "Christmas" when the heroine mentions it, but for the most part they'd be medieval historians, which she probably wouldn't encounter in a typical Hallmark-movie small town. Moreover, in every human society outside of the tropics (as discussed in Stephen Nissenbaum's delightful book THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS), the winter solstice has been celebrated by feasting and other forms of excess. In the absence of Yule or some other pagan observance, what, in this alternative universe, replaces Christmas? Apparently New Year's celebrations dominate the winter festive season, although this point is mentioned only once. The dialogue includes a slyly self-referential remark about New Year's-themed TV movies starting to air in June.

Aside from the practical difficulties of fitting this kind of speculation into a two-hour feature film (including commercial breaks), I suspect there's not much overlap between writers of alternate-history SF and made-for-TV romance movies.

Margaret L. Carter

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

Anti-Santas

You've probably heard of Krampus, the horned, hairy, bipedal monster from Austrian legend who prowls in December, mainly on Saint Nicholas Day (December 6), and stuffs misbehaving children into his sack to drag them to Hell:

The Krampus Legend

He even has his own website (which appears not to have been updated recently, since the calendar of festive events refers to 2015):

Krampus.com

The Jungian shadow of Santa Claus has other traditional representatives, however. While we joke about naughty children getting coal from Santa instead of presents, those scary Yuletide figures often take over the punishment task, allowing Santa to remain the good guy. Belsnickel, a fur-clad sidekick of Santa in Germany and among German immigrants in Pennsylvania, does play a dual role. He carries both switches to beat bad children and candy for good children. Similarly, another Christmas companion from Germany, Knecht Ruprecht, gives treats to good children but switches and coal to bad ones. He may also beat the naughty kids with the bag of ashes he carries. In the Netherlands, Zwarte Piet (Black Pete, referring mainly to his sooty appearance) whips bad children with a birch rod or carries them off in his sack. Joulupukki, the Yule Goat of Finland, is sometimes portrayed as an ugly creature who frightens children.

In THE BATTLE FOR CHRISTMAS, an entertaining, in-depth exploration of how the true old-fashioned Christmas (which would look to us like a blend of Thanksgiving, Halloween, and New Year's Eve) was converted in the nineteenth century to the child-centered family holiday we know, author Stephen Nissenbaum analyzes the origins and purpose of Clement Clarke Moore's "A Visit from Saint Nicholas" (aka "The Night Before Christmas"). Nissenbaum draws striking line-by-line parallels between Moore's poem and "The Day of Doom," written by a Massachusetts clergyman in the seventeenth century and still popular in the early nineteenth. The major difference between the two works is that the poem about Saint Nicholas includes no threats of "doom" or "judgment." The "jolly old elf" offers only gifts and good cheer, no coal or switches for naughty children. Christmas was being domesticated.

Traditions of anti-Santas bring to mind THE NIGHTMARE BEFORE CHRISTMAS, the movie in which Jack Skellington, the Pumpkin King, fascinated by the idea of Christmas but not fully understanding it, tries to appropriate the holiday because he thinks it should be more like Halloween. Likewise, in Terry Pratchett's fantasy novel HOGFATHER, when the existence of the Hogfather (the Discworld equivalent of Santa Claus) is threatened, Death steps up to save Hogswatchnight by temporarily filling the role of his fellow anthropomorphic personification. Not surprisingly, Death handles the job in rather eccentric ways. I especially like the conclusion of the novel, in which the Hogfather reverts to his primal persona as a nature deity in animal form, and only saving his life can ensure that the sun will rise at the winter solstice.

At the end of that climactic scene, Death insists that if the Hogfather had not been saved, the sun would not have risen. Susan, Death's granddaughter, asks what would have happened instead. In his customary all-caps dialogue, Death replies, "A MERE BALL OF FLAMING GAS WOULD HAVE ILLUMINATED THE WORLD."

Happy winter holiday season to all!

Margaret L. Carter

Carter's Crypt