Horror For The Holidays
Happy winter holidays, ghoul gang! Thank you so much for listening to another episode of this hand-crafted, small-batch, artisanal podcast that makes the perfect stocking stuffer for that hard-to-buy person on your gift list. In all seriousness, I am thinking of anyone who finds the holiday season hard. It can be a weird time, especially in North America, where we’re inundated with media about charming straight white people falling in love and reuniting with their family members over hot cocoa. I am especially thinking of any ghouls, ghasts or goblins who find this time to be really lonely, or have a difficult family situation that they’re dealing with. That’s always hard around the holidays and don’t I know it. I’m sending you lots of love, and telling you to stay warm and take care of yourself. Get lots of rest, drink plenty of water, and eat that entire chocolate orange! Oh sorry, that’s a note I wrote for myself.
I want to say thank you so much to every single one of you who has streamed and downloaded Small Town Spooky. In the last two weeks, it’s surpassed 520 streams, and that means so much to me considering this is Episode 8. Thanks especially to everyone listening on Stitcher! I’m so grateful for every single listen, comment and review. Thanks to Jeremy—what a blast from the past—for your DM on Instagram: “I just listened to the Texas Rd. Episode. Absolutely amazing! Congratulations on an amazing podcast! I will definitely download and subscribe.”
I also want to shout out everyone who participated in the Twitter thread about childhood fears related to the Monster Under the Bed episode, that was so much fun. Children’s author Bruce Coville himself responded to my tweet, and I only had a minor heart attack about it! He mentioned that his granddaughter recently watched Little Nemo’s Adventure in Slumberland, the film that absolutely petrified me as a kid—and she is 4! I am sending her well wishes for her future dreams. Other childhood fears people shared included: mascots, escalators, tv static, the Richard Gere film Mothman, a dog named “Me Too”, the film E.T., bodysnatchers, vampires (handily defeated by covering your neck with a blanket), aliens, An American Werewolf in London, a Cabbage Patch kid who looked a bit too much like a Chucky doll, a Halloween episode of Facts of Life where Blair Warner gets shellacked with clown makeup and ends up being a serial murderer, and bathrooms, just to name a few.
When I heard “bathrooms” as a childhood fear. My first thought was the upstairs bathroom in the house I grew up in. I didn’t share this in the Twitter thread, because it’s equal parts ridiculous and hard to fit into 240 characters. For context, my dad was an outdoorsman, a sportsman, and my childhood home was full of taxidermied animals. I did not think this was unusual until I was a lot older. Anyway, one of the gems in my dad’s collection of dead animals was a full-sized bull moose head mounted to the wall that overlooked the foyer, and sat dead opposite the upstairs guest bathroom. The whole moose head and the enormous antler rack were taller than me as a four-year-old—I know because I have a picture depicting scale. I will post it in the episode transcript for those who want to see. Now, I am not advocating for taxidermying animals from an environmental, ethical, or interior decorating perspective, let me just make that clear. But again, I was a child, and I thought this was, if not entirely normal, then certainly not so out of the ordinary as to make a big thing of it. Afterall, I shared the living room with mallards, pheasants and buffleheads, the staircase alcove housed a coyote, and the oversized dormer window above the front door featured a live mount of an adult wolf walking over a dried lichen and stone.
In retrospect, this was pretty strange.
[Image: Renée and their younger sibling standing next to the moose head mount, c. 1993.]
Anyway, my younger brother had this one friend in particular who would often come over and play in our backyard, their backyard, or on our street. We lived on a cul-de-sac and this boy, let’s call him Bic, lived just a few doors down. Anyway, one day he and my brother were doing whatever eight-year-old kids did before the internet was readily available—standing in a field hitting each other with sticks, probably—and they had the genius idea that Bic should spend the night. So they zip over to Bic’s, get his parents’ okay, then head back to our place and lay out a sleeping bag for him on the floor of my brother’s room. They stay up plenty late eating junk and playing video games and then go to sleep.
Later that night, in the wee hours, when everyone else in the house was sleeping and it was all dark and quiet, a soft noise interrupts my brother’s dreams. Groggily, he comes to, and when he’s finally awake he recognizes the sound he’s hearing: quiet, stifled crying. He leans over the side of his bed and sees Bic, wide awake and white as a sheet in his sleeping bag, tears streaming down his face. My brother tries to console him, to ask him what’s wrong, but he won’t say. My brother ends up waking my parents, who call Bic’s dad to walk him home from our house to theirs in the dark.
The next day, there’s no word from Bic. A week goes by and my brother goes to his house to see if Bic can come out to play; Bic’s parents turn him away and tell him Bic’s not well. A couple more weeks go by until finally one day, my brother is out in the field behind our house and he sees Bic walking towards him. Right away he asks Bic where he’s been, and if everything’s okay. He was really worried after Bic left our house in the middle of the night, clearly shaken and upset.
Bic goes red from his jaw to his hairline and, squaring his shoulders, tells my brother the story: that night, Bic had woken up. His bladder full from the Cokes and other junk they’d been snacking on, he had to go to the bathroom. So, he slipped out of his sleeping bag and opened the door to my brother’s room—only to catch the glinting glass eye of the enormous, monstrous moose head looming out of the dark. Of course he’d been over to our house hundreds of times during the day and seen the moose—you couldn’t miss it—but at night, with the barest illumination from the streetlamps outside putting up a feeble resistance against the thick darkness choking the hallway, the moose looked like it wasn’t so much hanging on the wall as leaning out of it, waiting to lunge forward as he walked by. Bic couldn’t say what about it terrified him so much, but he felt the fear down in his bones. He made it halfway down the hallway, the moose’s eyes seemingly tracking his every step, before he broke down in tears and ran back to the safety of my brother’s room. Not long after that my brother woke up and his dad came to collect him.
Now that’s not strictly a ghost story, nor did it take place during the holidays, but stay with me. This creepy story serves as a kick off for this festive Small Town Spooky two-parter. In Part 1, Horror for the Holidays, I’ll be talking about different winter holidays celebrated in small towns around the world and their traditions and superstitions.
I won’t be covering all of them (sorry to those who celebrate), but I will do my best to include as many as possible, with an extra emphasis on the ones with dark and spooky trappings. In addition to that, we’ll be talking about the most frightening figures from folklore associated with this time of year. What doesn’t fit in this first episode, I’ll be including in the second part of the holiday special. I’ll be sharing some scary true (and fictional) ghost stories and urban legends with a wintertime setting.
If you haven’t yet, I will also suggest listening to Episode 5: Harbingers of Halloween, which is the Halloween episode of Small Town Spooky (at least the first part) and Episode 7: Monsters Under the Bed. I’ll be referencing some of the folklore I talked about in both those episodes.
Now let’s ghost into it.
Trigger Warning
Trigger warnings for this episode include mentions of childbirth, use of blood for ritual purposes, the ritual killing of animals, the drowning and disemboweling of children.
Seasons’ Greetings
Communities within different cultures all around the world mark the months of winter with festivals and other rites. The Earth is tilted by 23.4° on its axis, and as it orbits around the sun, different sides of the earth receive more or less sunlight. As it rotates the sun’s light is spread over the Earth’s surface at different points. The solstices—winter and summer—and the equinoxes—autumn and spring—are the “extreme points” in these seasons. Because of how the Earth tilts, its northern hemisphere receives the least amount of light during the winter months, making the days shorter and causing the temperature to drop, freezing precipitation into snow and ice. “Solstice” is a word that comes from the Latin solstitium, meaning “sun standing”. The winter solstice is the shortest solar “day” of all the days that comprise the Earth’s annual rotation around the sun. This year the winter solstice will be December 21, though historically the date has varied.
In North America and Europe, we tend to think about our annual calendar as being the standard (thank you, Eurocentrism). It indicates the dates and the timing of specific holidays, like Christmas. This is according to the Gregorian calendar, and dates are determined according to the position of the Sun relative to the stars. In this episode I’ll be talking about winter-related holidays and festivals that are not always comparable to Christmas; these are celebrated according to lunisolar calendars, which are calendars that incorporate both the moon phase and the solar year into the date, as well as lunar calendars, which are solely based on the moon’s monthly phases.
The Winter Solstice
The earliest human beings knew that the sun was crucial to their survival. The Mesopotamians, Babylonians, and Egyptians were all proficient astronomers who tracked the movements of the sun and moon relative to the stars through the sky, charting maps and using these to determine annual religious and civic festivals, days for planting and harvesting crops, and religious rites. According to some scholars, the Mesopotamian New Year Festival marked the winter solstice, with a celebration honouring the god-king Marduk for overthrowing the forces of chaos, who were more active during the winter months, and ushering in the coming of spring.
In Ancient Egypt, the first date of the lunar calendar was midwinter, when the goddess Nut gave birth to the sun god, Rē or Ra. Scholars who have studied hieroglyphs, tomb and papyrus art from imperial Egypt, have made the case that Nut, often appearing as a woman whose body is spangled with stars, was the personification of the Milky Way. The Milky way arcs across the sky in an orientation corresponding with depictions of Nut, who arches over the Earth with her toes touching the soil in the east and her fingertips against the ground in the west. Studying star charts from 3500 BCE, researchers saw that on the morning of the winter solstice, the Milky Way was visible in the eastern part of the sky. The large cluster of stars around the constellation Gemini at the end of its arc in the west formed a round, stellated shape like the head of a goddess. The rising sun appeared to come through the constellation Cygnus, in the eastern part of the sky, where the Milky way splits in two distinct, parallel segments like legs. Thus Nut, as the Milky Way, “birthed” the rising sun at midwinter 5519 years ago.
Scholars have linked the Persian or Iranian Zoroastrian lunisolar calendar to the one used by Egyptians, where the first day of the new year corresponded with the winter solstice. Iranians today still observe Shab-e-Yalda (Yalda Night) also known as Shab-e Chelleh on the winter solstice, with some scholars attributing its origins to a historical Zoroastrian feast, and others to the Persian cult of the sun god Mithras. Traditional beliefs associated with Yalda Night have it that “the earth stops breathing” and demons hold sway over it. Keeping a vigil for the return of the sun, those who observe Yalda Night eat nuts and fruit like pomegranate to fend off future illness, and give thanks for the bounty of the year, praying that the earth will resume its breathing in the coming weeks, in time to ensure a prosperous spring. In Pakistan, the Kalasha people have marked the winter solstice for hundreds of years with the festival of Chaumos, burning juniper to ward against harmful supernatural spirits, and inviting the dead into their homes for a final meal.
From as far back as the second imperial Han dynasty, people in China have celebrated Dongzhi, the winter solstice festival. A manuscript dating to the Song dynasty describes oracles making predictions for the fortune of the coming year from watching the clouds at the winter solstice. In modern China, dongzhi is celebrated by people coming together with family and eating dumplings or rice cakes; in Taiwan, an old folk superstition holds that sticking some of the colorful tangyuan on the windows and doors works as a talisman to keep out evil spirits and garner the protection of the gods.
By the river Boyne in Ireland, the archaeological site of Brug na Boinne is reputedly the burial site of the sun-god Lug. Likely used for community gatherings and ritual activities by Neolithic farming communities, it includes a complex of stone tombs built between 3260 and 3080 BCE. Archaeologists have observed that the central burial chamber’s back wall is illuminated by a thin ray of light from the sunrise of the winter solstice. In England, Stonehenge and the nearby Neolithic site of Durrington Walls (c. 2500 BCE) were both built to face the winter solstice sunset, and sunrise (respectively), a time marked by feasting and likely animal sacrifice.
Episode 7: Monster Under the Bed featured one of the Zuni People Native American’s folkloric figures, the kachina who appears as a fearsome ogre woman who menaces badly behaved children during annual coming of age rites. The Zuni also participate in a winter solstice festival where members of the community dress in costume evoking giant bird deities, spirits connected to the kachina. They carry prayers for rain and ask for blessings and balance for the coming year, especially as relates to the harvest. The Blackfeet of Montana also honoured the annual passing of the sun or “Naatosi” by turning their tipis to the east, playing games and holding community dances. Today, these traditions have been transferred to late December and the beginning of January, because of historical government bans on Native American gatherings and traditional community celebrations.
Before French colonists invaded the region now known as Missouri, it was the traditional home of Native Americans belonging to the Illini Confederacy: the Cahokia, Kaskaskia, Michigamea, Moingwena, and Peoria. “Missouri” comes from the Siouan name for the tribe of Missouria, signifying “big canoe people”; “Mississippi” is a bastardized French interpretation of the Algonquin mshi ("big") and siipi ("river"). The Cahokia temple pyramids, sometimes called “the Cahokia mounds”, are structures located near the Mississippi River. They include a structure made of wooden posts, set in a circle, sometimes called “woodhenge”. Scientists observing the site on the winter solstice saw that the sun aligned with Woodhenge, as well as the top of one of the temple mounds in the distance. Archeological evidence supports the theory that the Moundbuilder Indigenous peoples responsible for building these structures at Cahokia venerated a solar deity and observed the winter solstice as an annual rite, marking the return of the sun and the renewal of the growing season.
Between 3600 and 3500 BCE, the Chumash people of the Santa Barbara Channel in California established and used religiously significant rock shrines along the coast of the Pacific Ocean. Archeologists found lithographs and carved stones, some of which were used in winter solstice ceremonies where supplicants petitioned the Sun, which was understood to be a “powerful supernatural being capable of giving life, warmth and light, or bringing death.” In Chumash oral tradition the Sun faced off every night of the year against Snile-mun (shneelaymune), the mythical trickster/hero Sky Coyote who appears in the sky as the North Star. The two beings competed in the game of peon, a sort of “guess which hand” scenario played with sticks of varying lengths painted white or black and hidden in the opponents’ hands. Every year, by the date of the winter solstice, if the Sun had more total wins at peon than Sky Coyote, humans would suffer from devastating drought in the coming year and face the threat of death; if Sky Coyote won, the year would be marked by fair weather and a bountiful harvest.
Brumalia and Saturnalia
In Europe, before the spread of Christianity, there were many flavours of festivals oriented around the winter solstice and the transition into colder months. At different points, the ancient Romans celebrated two major winter holidays: Brumalia and Saturnalia. Brumalia was a 24-day holiday beginning at the end of November, ushering in the winter solstice. The name of the festival is derived from the Latin bruma, used to identify the shortest day of the year. Supposedly this is a contraction of brevissima, indicating “death” or the day the light dies. It may be connected with Sol Invictus, the “unconquered Sun” god, although some sources give it that the festival for Sol or Natalis Invictus came after the other winter Roman festival: Saturnalia.
Saturnalia was originally celebrated on December 17th, although historically, iterations of the festival sometimes took place over three days, five, and even an entire week. It was a celebration of Saturn, the venerated agricultural god who was said to be responsible for the “Golden Age” of Rome—that is, the time after the fall of the Republic and the dawn of the Empire in 27 BCE, ushered in by Emperor Augustus, heir apparent to Julius Caesar and a man with a grasp of PR far ahead of his time. This period of about 200 years is sometimes called Pax Romana (“The Peace of Rome”) which was likely largely true for anyone not being crushed under the boot heel of the expanding Roman empire during that period.
During Saturnalia in Rome, enslaved people and servants swapped places with their masters—the “lord of misrule” that still factors into some celebrations of Halloween or Hallowmas as we heard in Episode 5 of Small Town Spooky. Romans brought trees, laurel and cypress into their homes for good luck, although the practice of putting up a gaily bedecked evergreen in the home would not be seen until Germany in the sixteenth century CE. Romans used lit candles to signify the persistence of light through the long winter’s dark; they distributed small gifts of money, sweets and lamps, rings, cloaks and hairpins and even wooly slippers. They lit bonfires for nightly festivities, the blaze of heat and light reminding everyone of the sun’s imminent return.
The Wild Hunt and the Tangled Roots of Yule
The Romans had subjugated the Celtic tribes in Gaul under the leadership of Julius Caesar and they “peacefully” pushed into the territory north of the Rhine, seizing it and naming the province Germania, in the first century CE. Based on Roman accounts of the Germanic tribes, scholars theorize that the Germanic New Year began sometime in November, when the weather turned cold and the harvest season had concluded. The early Germanic tribes had their own winter-time customs, including sitting on cowhide at a crossroad under the first full moon of winter to receive an oracle for the coming year and bringing the effigy of a god around to visit the dwellings of the villagers at the beginning of every month to invite prosperity and health. Eventually, people in northwestern Europe also took up the tradition of bringing evergreen boughs into their homes to mark the winter solstice and bring good fortune and prosperity for the coming year.
Some few centuries later, around 730 CE, the first account of a midwinter festival called jól or Yule came from St. Bede, a Christian academic making a record of pagan Germanic practices. The strongest evidence for a Germanic midwinter celebration comes from the scholar Rudolf Simek, who compiled a handbook of historic German terms and mythology. Speculation among scholars is that midwinter was a time for cult activity (blót) including ritual sacrifice in the interest of “the growth of the soil”. Fires were lit and the blood of sacrificed livestock was smeared on temple idols and walls, and any men present would be sprinkled with blood. Jól may also be connected to álfablót, literally “sacrifice to the elves”, a feast held in midwinter to mark the solstice and honour the dead, where a boar or pig is sacrificed.
Simek and other scholars have connected Yule to the Wild Hunt, a traditional folk belief from parts of Germany and Britain that a procession of ghostly figures would be visible in the sky around the winter solstice, and that any living person found out and about on that night was at risk of being swept up into it. The leader of the Wild Hunt’s procession has been variously given as, among others, Odin (the Norse god of war, to put it reductively), the Celtic figure of Herne the Hunter, and Diana, the Greek goddess of the hunt. The first consolidated description of the Wild Hunt comes from Jacob Grimm’s (yes, that Grimm) Teutonic Mythology, where he refers, alternatively, to “the furious host” or “the furious hunt” as an army-like procession headed up by Wotan (an archaic name for Odin) and composed of valkyries and other violent and raucous spirits of the dead. The howling of the wind when the Wild Hunt is afoot (or better yet, a-sky) is attributed to Odin’s wagon. There are many variants and folkloric figures associated with the Hunt depending on the region, but for more on that you’ll have to wait for Part 2 of Small Town Spooky’s Holiday Special.
The Twelve Days of Christmas Plus
At the height of its sprawl, the Roman Empire reached from Northern continental Africa, into the east as far as modern-day Syria, and North past Germany into England and the British Isles in the North. Even as the empire overextended itself and fell into decay, the amount of contact and control exercised by the Romans facilitated the spread of Christianity. As I said in “Harbingers of Halloween”, the Catholic Church loves a feast day. In the early days of Christianity’s spread through Europe, there was a feast day for just about every saint and only a few “major” calendrical holidays. In terms of importance, Christmas was completely overshadowed by Easter, a day sometime in spring that marked the miracle of Jesus’ resurrection after his crucifixion by the Romans and his posthumous three-day nap. It wasn’t until the 9th century CE that Christmas saw official liturgical endorsement (that means it got a specific mass) from the Catholic Church. The official origins of the December 25th date are hotly disputed (at least in certain academic circles). The arguments can be distilled into two main factions: one, that scholars in the early church performed a calculation, working backward from Jesus’ age on the date of his death; the other, that the Roman feast of Saturnalia along with other winter solstice-aligned festivals in regions scattered through the Roman Empire, swayed the date setters.
In any case, the new(ish) holiday picked up speed and popularity (probably owing in no small part to the people eager to continue celebrating their traditional annual festivals under the gloss of commemorating Baby Jesus) and by the Middle Ages the religious winter-time observations ran the span of November to February. I took a lot of this information from Benito Cereno’s series called Magic and Legends of Old Christmas which I recommend if you want a more complete look at all the extended Yule-tide customs of the Christian canon. Beginning with St. Martin’s Day on November 11th, Europeans marked the end of the harvest, lighting roaring bonfires and, in some cases, hollowed-out lanterns made from root vegetables (sound familiar?), slaughtering a pig to feast and drinking well into the night. In Ireland and Scotland, it was thought that the dead returned to their old homes on this day. In Germany, a folkloric figure named Pelzmärtel carrying a large sack and wearing animal pelts and a long white beard carries presents to well-behaved children on St. Martin’s Eve, or swats them with the switches he keeps in his sack. In some towns, men rub boot-black on their faces and don furs and long white beards and parade through the streets in an annual parade, throwing sweets to children watching.
In Scotland, Saint Andrew’s Day is a bank holiday, in recognition of the saint’s national importance. November 29th, Saint Andrew’s Eve, is a night associated with divination, magic, and the supernatural. In Romania, this was believed to be the kickoff of vampire season, when the beings would be roaming the countryside in full force. Especially crucial was to stay away from crossroads, where they tended to congregate. Wolves, too, were said to be on the prowl, and with a curious quality: on Saint Andrew’s Eve, wolves could speak in a way that was intelligible to any human who heard them, but if you had the misfortune to receive a message, you would soon die.
December 13, The Feast of Saint Lucy, is celebrated widely especially in Scandinavia and Italy. It’s known as the “darkest day of the year”. The original date may have actually been the winter solstice, but due to calendar reform, it was shifted to earlier in the month by the Church. Celebrants carry candles aloft to drive away the dark, because the night before the Feast of Saint Lucy is full of terrors: trolls, demons, evil spirits and werewolves. In Austria, a nega-verse version of Lucy herself, “Lutzelfrau” or “Bloody Lucy” sometimes portrayed by a young woman dressed in rags carrying knives or a sickle, is said to wander around on St. Lucy’s Eve and sneak into homes that don’t put out offerings of food or drink to appease her. In some regions, she was known to throw badly behaved children into the river, or gut them, winding their intestines up onto her staff. Young men might get out of their beds on Saint Lucy’s Eve to look for the “Lucy light”, a “spectral glow” in the sky whose shapes might reveal what was to come in the year ahead.
St. Barbara, the patron saint of soldiers and miners, armourers, mathematicians, and those at risk of injury from explosions or lightning, has a feast day on December 4. And I bet you didn’t believe me when I said the Church had a saint for everything. In some parts of the Czech Republic, girls known as Baborki or “little Barbaras” dress in a traditional costume—a white dress with a red sash that represents Saint Barbara’s martyrdom and a white veil, carrying a basket in one hand and a broom or switch in the other. They go door-to-door, asking if there are any good children in the house; if yes, they distribute small gifts from their baskets; if no, they may swat the children with their broom and declare their intention to tell Saint Nikolas not to bother bringing any presents for them. In Germany, the Bärbele or “wild Barbaras” roam the streets on Saint Barbara’s Eve in masks made from pinecones, seed, moss and sometimes fur, molded into grotesque gargoyle-like shapes, brandishing switches and throwing candies to parade watchers.
[Image: Young men dressed as "Klausen" in large, furred costumes and headpieces studded with horns flank a woman dressed in the guise of a "Bärbele" or "Wild Barbara". Source: Freienhof-Gehring.de]
The Wild Barbaras are usually seen with Klausen. During Advent, young men in costumes made of layered furs and massive, horned masks run through the streets, rattling cowbells and whipping passersby with their rods. In the small town of Sonthofen, the Klausentreiben run has been practiced for over a thousand years. Some regional variations of these have fur-covered headdresses as tall as a man, or menacing mouths of carved wooden teeth framed by animal horns. The photographer Charles Fréger has a gallery of incredible portraits of people dressed in klausen-type folk garb online called Wilder-Mann, which I will link in the episode transcript.
Monsters Dashing Through the Snow
In Episode 7: Monster Under the Bed, I talk about the boogeymen figures from different cultures who scared children into going to bed on time, some of which were called “bag men”—menacing male figures who carried large sacks in which to spirit children away from their long-suffering parents. These folkloric figures overlap with Christmas tradition. Just like the Barbaras and Pelzmärtel, some of the bag-carriers are “gift-givers”, folkloric figures who both punish naughty children and reward well-behaved ones.
The most famous man with a bag in holiday terms is Santa Claus or Father Christmas. He is likely based on the 4th century Bishop Saint Nicholas, who performed many miracles and supposedly loved giving out gifts. Saint Nicholas’ feast day was fixed by the Church on December 6th, though Santa is said to deliver gifts to children while they sleep on Christmas Eve. The legend of Santa Claus in North America has accumulated some creepy trappings—he sees you when you’re sleeping, he knows when you’re awake, he knows if you’ve been bad or good—and some incentive for children to behave, lest they receive a lump of coal rather than the latest VR headset. In Japan, Santa Kuroshu is an entity connected to Santa who is said to have “eyes in the back of his head”. They get it.
Krampus, a large beast with massive claws, curling horns, and a long, red, slavering tongue is the terrifying counterpart to the beneficent Saint Nicholas. He beats misbehaving children with birch branches before carrying them off to live in his lair for the rest of their miserable lives. In local parades, Krampus is often accompanied by the even more horrifying racist caricature known as Black Pete. Blackface is not an appropriate choice for the holidays, or any other day. Belsnickel or Pelsnickel is a similar figure to Pelzmärtel, but he came around later, with Saint Nicholas, ready with a bag of treats or a switch to beat the bad kids. Knect Ruprecht was another companion of old Saint Nick’s (I mean, if you can tell the character of a man by the company he keeps, this isn’t looking good…) who went from house to house asking children to pray. If they did, he would reward them with treats, but if not, he might give them a lump of coal or beat them with a bag of ashes, and leave their parents a switch for them to continue the corporal punishment during the year.
But why let creepy men have all the fun of terrorizing children? Frau Perchta, a witch living in the mountains of Austria, visits the homes of children through the 12 days of Christmas, leaving coins for those who have been good and slitting the bellies of those who haven’t, replacing their guts with straw and stones. Italy’s Christmas witch, La Befana, is much nicer. Perhaps worse than the witches is Gryla, an ogre from Icelandic folklore dating back to the 13th century. She comes down from her mountain cave each year with the sole aim of abducting children for her winter meal—a nice barn stew. As if that wasn’t enough, she enforces her reign of terror by unleashing her horrible progeny, the thirteen Yule Lads, to wreak further havoc—and with names like Window Peeper, Sausage Swiper, and Candle Stealer, you can imagine what they get up to. Joining this nightmarish family outing is Gryla’s Yule Cat, the Jólakötturinn, who stalks and eats those who don’t don their gay apparel (wear new clothes) at Christmas.
In Japan, the winter New Year celebration of Shogatsu sees families thoroughly cleaning their houses, placing a straw rope (called a shimenawa “enclosing rope”) made of rice straw or hemp, as well as white paper strips—“shide”—above their front door. According to Shinto belief, these items purify the home, welcoming in the kami of the New Year and keeping out evil. The kami are spirits of deceased human beings who can be powerful, petty, kindly or threatening and sometimes possess the powers of the natural world. The toshigami is the kami who visits at New Year. Another spirit associated with new year rituals is the mikari baba, a yōkai that takes the guise of an old one-eyed woman wearing a raggedy straw hat and coat and carrying a lit torch in its mouth. Yōkai are supernatural beings that can be ghosts or monsters or natural phenomena, for starters, and many of them roam Japan in the winter months.
For their part, mikari baba haunt the villages of eastern Japan, going from house to house begging for scraps and scavenging anything that’s not nailed down—including any unwary person’s eyeball, if they can get their hands on it. The only way to avoid them is to keep a tidy house and shut oneself up inside it on days when they’re said to be active, staying quiet and dousing the lamps. Mikari baba are afraid of any objects with many holes in them, perhaps because the holes remind them of their missing eyes, so things like sieves and woven cages are hung up outside to keep them at bay. They keep a ledger for the gods, recording the names of families for them to use when meteing out sickness and other punishments, which is likely in connection to the origin of the word “mikari”, which refers to a period of reflection and fasting before religious ceremonies. Any person not inside their homes during a requisite period of mikari must be a yōkai, ready to stir up trouble.
There are several “hag” yōkai wandering around causing trouble in the winter in Japan, including amazake baba who begs for sweet sake and once heralded the outbreak of smallpox, and now the common cold. To keep her away, people in Japan would hang a cedar branch across their doorway. The oshiroi baba looks like a haggard old woman with a face caked with white powder and can be heard coming by a tell-tale rattle that sounds like a mirror being dragged along the ground, when they come down from the mountains on snowy nights. They are associated with the yuki onna, spirits who appear in the guise of women and hunt humans, disorienting travellers on mountain roads or freezing people in their homes at night.
Yuki onna or “snow women” can coexist with humans, appearing as normal human women with long black hair and dark eyes, though their beauty might seem “otherworldly” somehow and their bodies are freezing cold. They feed on the life energy, pulling it from the breath of their victims and leaving them frozen solid. Similarly, tsurara onna are yōkai created from the loneliness of single men during the winter months. They appear as exceptionally beautiful women, who disappear once the cold weather starts to clear.
There are many traditional stories about tsurara and yuki onna and I’ve included a couple in the second part of the Small Town Spooky Holiday Special.
Snowy Superstitions
Feeling a little on edge after this parade of freakish figures? Me too. The cold, dark depths of winter nights have presented a source of anxiety to people for millennia. Here are some superstitions that they thought might help them stay secure through those long, cold months.
Because evil spirits and witches are a serious concern on holiday nights, in Norway, brooms are hidden to prevent witches from riding around on them and causing havoc. It’s also said there that if you are out late on a winter evening during Yule-tide, and you hear the hosts of the Wild Hunt, you should throw yourself on the ground and pretend to sleep, lest you be dragged into their procession. Another way to ward off the devils in their roaming, in Sweden and Denmark, is to bake lussebullar or Lucy buns, in honor of Saint Lucy. In Portugal, Christmas dinner is set upon the table with an extra place for the dead, and food scraps are left out in the kitchen for them to eat. In Guatemala, people clean their house the week before Christmas, collect all their trash and burn it in a huge fire topped by an effigy of the Devil, cleansing the evil and rubbish with fire.
Yule logs burned in fireplaces all over Europe on Christmas Eve til morning. If you lit the fire with a piece of last year’s log, salvaged from the ashes and saved, it was said to protect the house and bring good fortune for the coming year. In France and the Isle of Man, villagers would hunt down a wren on Christmas Eve, mount it to a pole with its wings extended and carry it through the streets of their town, collecting money until, satisfied, they laid it on a bier and took it to the church yard to be buried. In Poland, a man dressed in a wolfskin is led around on Christmas Day, or a stuffed wolf is carried door to door to collect money for
church coffers. In Wales, a man carrying a horse’s skull bedecked with colourful ribbons and draped in a white sheet is attended by carollers, or wasaillers, and roams door to door. Despite its morbid appearance, the “Mary Lwyd”—which may mean “Holy Mary”, “grey mare” or “merry game”, depending on who you ask—is a sign of good luck. If it comes a-knocking singing songs or asking a riddle, you must be ready to reply, and to share a warming beverage, or bad luck is sure to follow in the coming year.
Mistletoe, the parasitic plant, was thought to be sacred to Druids and, when cut with a golden sickle by a druid clad in a white robe, on the sixth day of the new moon, from a tree where two white bulls have been sacrificed, it could be used to brew a potion that would make barren animals fertile, and protect anyone who ingested it from all poisons. Whether this claim is true, the tradition of hanging mistletoe from the ceiling at Yuletide has persisted. In Switzerland, an old folk superstition holds that mistletoe protects from lightning strikes, because supposedly it only grows from tree boughs that have been struck by lightning. This is an example of sympathetic or imitative magic, the idea that you can use something that has a connection or looks like something else to protect against it or affect it.
Once you’ve rid your house of brooms, garbage, set a log on fire, killed a bird and donned your wolfskin, here’s a fun game to play with your vaccinated friends and family this holiday season: get a shallow bowl, and fill it with nuts, raisins, and any other dried fruit you have
lying around. Then, douse the whole thing in brandy (or another spirit of your choice) and light that sucker up. While the plate burns, take your chance reaching into the flames and plucking out a delicious, fiery morsel. This game was called “Snapdragon” and was so popular with the Victorians it was immortalized in verse:
With his blue and lapping tongue Many of you will be stung, Snip! Snap! Dragon! For he snaps at all that comes Snatching at his feast of plums Snip ! Snap! Dragon!”
“Questions and Commands” was another Victorian holiday favourite, very similar to our “truth or dare”, but fuelled with spiked holiday beverages. Their most enduring tradition might be the telling of ghost stories at Christmas—which I’ll be honouring in the second part of Small Town Spooky’s holiday special, where I wrangle some of the most festive, freakiest stories for your listening pleasure.
Outro
Thank you so much for coming along on another exciting adventure into the gruesome details of different festive folklore. The research for this episode was so interesting. It checked some of the personal biases I had about midwinter festivals being this universal thing—they really depend on the culture, and the religious observances that are most common in it, and while a lot of pre-historic sites seem to factor the solstices into their construction and design, that doesn’t mean for sure that they were ritual sites, although “for ritual purposes” is an archaeologist’s best guess a lot of the time when it comes to theorizing about a building or tool’s intended use.
I also love that there is a thread of commonality to all of these bits of legend, superstition and folklore. The threat of the cold, of the lengthening nights, the desire to have something green remind us of the spring coming back; something warm and bright like fires to encourage the sun to return; and our fixation with the fact that the cold can kill us. The idea that somehow, when we come through this long, dark tunnel, there is absolution waiting on the other side—you might go into the winter as your “worst” self, but you have an opportunity to atone, whether that’s by being a good community member or just staying inside and minding your business and not freezing to death.
I know for me, I like to keep up with Trans Santa, this organization that answers letters from trans youth who might not be out and are asking for certain things to alleviate their gender dysphoria. They have an Instagram you can follow: @transsanta. And there are other community outreach websites and social media profiles, depending on where you live, that put out a call for community donations—now whether that’s cash, cigarettes, bus tickets, warm jackets, things like that. It feels good to give to people who really need it, especially when it’s so cold and foreboding outside.
Here are a few just to start:
Thanks again for listening and if you want to support the show, please find the link to the Small Town Spooky Ko-Fi account. All I want for my non-denominational winter holiday present this year is for you to leave a five-star review on the podcast streaming app of your choice. And if you enjoyed this episode, I’d love to hear about it. You can email smalltownspooky@gmail.com and I’ll feature it on the show (or not, per your request). Make sure to keep your ears open for the second part of the Small Town Spooky Holiday Special, featuring wintery scary stories to tell around the fire and urban legends for the holiday season.
Until next time, a very happy holiday from my family to yours, thanks for listening and hope to spook you soon. ;)
Music Credits
Special thanks to the providers of the music for this episode.
It’s Not Hard to Get Lost by Bryan Mathys (title theme); Cotswold Snow, The Sighful Branches, The Silent Grove and Frost on the Meadows at Dawn (after Holst, Abroad as I was walking / Lord Dunwaters) by Axletree; Fantasía del Bello Alcazar by sawsquarenoise; Winter Night and Tavern Loop One by Alexander Nakarada all licensed under Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 License.
“Crackling Fireplace and Soft Piano Music” and “In the Bleak Midwinter” by Julius_H; “Horror Background Music” by Lesfm; “Dance of Nordic Leaves” by GioeleFazzeri and all sound effects courtesy of Freesounds.org are licensed under Creative Commons 0.
Sources & Further Reading
Barber, Elizabeth Wayland, and Paul T. Barber. “Of Sky and Time.” When They Severed Earth from Sky: How the Human Mind Shapes Myth, Princeton University Press, 2004, pp. 176–217.
Cacopardo, Alberto, and Augusto Cacopardo. “The Kalasha (Pakistan) Winter Solstice Festival.” Ethnology, vol. 28, no. 4, University of Pittsburgh- Of the Commonwealth System of Higher Education, 1989, pp. 317–29.
Churco, Jennie M. “Christmas And The Roman Saturnalia.” The Classical Outlook, vol. 16, no. 3, American Classical League, 1938, pp. 25–26.
Dorrian, G. and I. Whittaker. “Winter solstice: the astronomy of Christmas.” The Conversation, Dec. 20, 2018.
Everington, Keoni. “Top 10 Taiwanese Superstitions to Follow for Luck on Dongzhi, Winter Solstice.” Taiwan News, 22 Dec. 2018.
Flower, Richard. “The busy Romans needed a mid-winter break too … and it lasted for 24 days.” The Conversation, Dec. 21, 2016.
Frazer, Sir James George. The Golden Bough. Edited by Robert Fraser, Oxford University Press, 2003.
Grimm, Jacob. Teutonic Mythology. United Kingdom, G. Bell and sons, 1883.
Johnson, Marguerite. “Harking back: the ancient pagan festivities in our Christmas rituals.” The Conversation, Dec. 7, 2014.
Koch, John T.. Celtic Culture: A Historical Encyclopedia. United Kingdom, ABC-CLIO, 2006.
LaPier, Rosalyn R. “What winter solstice rituals tell us about indigenous people.” The Conversation, Dec. 12, 2018.
Lawrence-Mathers, Anne. “Decking the Halls of History: The Origins of Christmas Decorations.” The Conversation, Dec. 19, 2019.
Lecouteux, Claude. Encyclopedia of Norse and Germanic Folklore, Mythology, and Magic. United States, Inner Traditions/Bear, 2016.
Lindow, John. Norse Mythology: A Guide to Gods, Heroes, Rituals, and Beliefs. United Kingdom, Oxford University Press, USA, 2002.
Morrison, Dorothy. Yule: A Celebration of Light & Warmth, Llewellyn Publications, 2000.
Orchard, Andy. Dictionary of Norse myth and legend. London, Cassell, 1997.
Palmer, Alex. The Atlas of Christmas: The Merriest, Tastiest, Quirkiest Holiday Traditions from Around the World. United States, Running Press, 2020.
Pendle, George. “Victorians’ Christmas Parlor Games Will Leave You Burned, Bruised, and Puking.” Atlas Obscura, 22 Dec. 2016.
Perry, Jennifer E. “Chumash Ritual and Sacred Geography on Santa Cruz Island, California.” Journal of California and Great Basin Anthropology, vol. 27, no. 2, Malki Museum, Inc., 2007, pp. 103–24.
Taqizadeh, S. H. “The Old Iranian Calendars Again.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 14, no. 3, Cambridge University Press, 1952, pp. 603–11.
Tille, Alexander. “Yule And Christmas: Their Place in the Germanic Year.” Transactions of the Glasgow Archaeological Society, vol. 3, no. 2, Edinburgh University Press, 1899, pp. 426–97.
Thurman, Trace. “5 Absolutely Terrifying Christmas Legends!” Bloody Disgusting!, 13 Dec. 2016.
Wells, R. A. “The Mythology of Nut and the Birth of Ra.” Studien Zur Altägyptischen Kultur, vol. 19, Helmut Buske Verlag GmbH, 1992, pp. 305–21.
Williams, E. Leslie. “A Unity Of Pattern In The Kami Tradition: Orienting ‘shinto’ Within A Context Of Pre-Modern And Contemporary Ritual Practice.” Journal of Ritual Studies, vol. 14, no. 2, Pamela J. Stewart and Andrew J. Strathern, 2000, pp. 34–47.
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