We spend much of our midwinter in joyous celebrations – of Christmas, of New Year, with friends and family, good food, good drink and bright fires blazing in our hearths, But beyond that firelight, there are lingering shadows: we might associate Christmas with parties, love and general jolliness, but for millennia it was a time when the world was turned on its head, when hideous creatures rampaged through the streets, when the dead returned, when chaos reigned. Associated with all these horrors are a host of unsettling celebrations and rituals – there’s plenty to pick from, but here are my own top 10.
Elect a Lord of Misrule
If you’re finding your Christmas parties lacking a certain something, why not elect a Lord of Misrule to lead you in wild and chaotic revels. A practice that originated with the Roman festivals of Saturnalia about 2,000 years ago, where mock kings were elected by friends to issue ridiculous commands, which included everything from dancing naked to shouting insulting lies, it spread to medieval Christmas celebrations. By the early modern period, the puritan pamphleteer Philip Stubbs was complaining that the Lords of Misrule brought “devilry, whoredom, drunkenness, pride and whatnot” to Christmas celebrations, and while he wasn’t entirely unbiased in his condemnation we have many accounts of riots, smashed windows, and even a manslaughter charge brought against a Lord of Misrule in England after his Christmas games went awry. Less likely to recommend because manslaughter charges probably aren’t what anyone wants for Christmas.
Watch the solstice at Stonehenge
There are many ancient monuments across Europe that are aligned with the midwinter sun, so marking the moment of the longest night was clearly a popular practice a few millennia ago. It seems to have died out fairly early on: by the time Christmas was arriving on the scene, most of these monuments had been long abandoned. But if you feel like reviving it, you can head to Stonehenge for 21 December, where there are two choices – the first is to go for the solstice sunrise, when English Heritage lets you stand in the middle of the stone circle and experience the joy of the sun rising at the end of its longest night. But Stonehenge was actually aligned to midwinter sunset, not the sunrise. You can’t get into the centre of the stones for the solstice evening, but you can still see the sun set through the main stone archway from some distance away. To modern sensibilities at least, there’s something extraordinarily melancholy about bidding the sun farewell rather than welcoming it, and watching as its last rays – caught by the huge, uncanny stones – slip below the horizon before the longest, darkest night of the year.
Crown a St Lucy
The night of St Lucy is 13 December. She was a young Christian girl who, according to legend, was martyred in Syracuse in the 4th century AD. Every year, across the Nordic countries, young girls are crowned as Lucy in eerily beautiful ceremonies, by having a wreath of lit candles placed on their heads. But make sure all your work is put away for her celebration, and remember to leave out food offerings for her overnight, because there’s another side to Lucy. She’s not just a good, Christian girl but also a rampaging witch who flies across the sky on 13 December leading a cavalcade of the dead – and she has no hesitation in murdering or cursing those who don’t honour her properly. Sadly, people don’t tend to leave out food for her much any more (in previous centuries the dining table would have been set ready and waiting for her). Bonus points for this celebration as it comes with its own saffron-spiced, raisin-studded bun, the “luciapullat”.
Go on a year walk
This involves going out in the pre-dawn darkness of Christmas Eve, without talking to anyone, without looking into any fires, and without eating anything. If you fancy a year walk, stroll far enough away from any houses so you wouldn’t be able to hear a cockerel crow, and then head to your local church and sit and wait by the graveyard. According to a Swedish tradition, attested in numerous folk tales (archived in the Swedish Folklore Archive, if you happen to speak Swedish and want to know more), you’ll see shadowy enactments of any burials that will happen in the coming year. And if that doesn’t work, you can try peeping through the keyhole of the church door, to see the premonition of a service in a year’s time – anyone missing from their pew will be dead before the year is out. Though be warned, there are dangers in all of this – the folklore tells that monsters, madness and death threaten those who go on year walks. And, perhaps more to the point, who really wants to get up that early on Christmas Eve?
Go guising
From late antiquity across Europe, Christmas – and especially 1 January – was a time when you dressed as a monster and ran house-to-house demanding food, drink and money – a practice called guising. The UK seems to have come to the practice fairly late – it was only in the early modern period that British sources start mentioning everyone running door-to-door dressed as horrible creatures. You might think that sounds quite close to trick-or-treating, and you’d be right – but it was a Christmas tradition first, and a Halloween one second. There are plenty of excellent guising monsters to pick from if you’re thinking of dressing up this year– from the Skekars of Shetland, Orkney and the Faroes who dress in , antlered straw costumes, to the Klaubaufs of Matrei in Austria who look like fur-clad demons and drag people into the street to throw them in the snow.
Participate in a pwnco
Do you want to spend Christmas in a poetry contest with a skeletal horse? Then the pwnco is the dark ritual for you. Normally found in Wales, the Mari Lwyd is a horse skull, often stuck with tinsel, with baubles in its eyes, held on a stick by a performer who hides under a sheet. The Mari is recorded from the 18th century in Wales, and is a guising monster with a twist, visiting houses (often led by a gang of supporters), demanding entry, food and drink – but if the residents want the ghostly horse and its retinue gone, they have to outwit them in a rhyming battle of insults, or “pwnco”. If your rhyming is good enough, the horse will leave you be. The practice declined in the late 19th century and, while you can still find it across Wales, it tends to be a formulaic call and response between the monster and its reluctant hosts. Bumped up the list for the joyous surrealism.
Go wassailing
If you wanted to do something else with a skeletal horse, you could always take it to an orchard. In the new year in the UK there are plenty of wassails, a winter tradition where people gather in orchards to wish good health to the apple trees in the coming year, drinking cider and pouring it on the trees’ roots, hanging toast from the branches for birds, and often shouting loudly and banging pans to drive away evil spirits. The Chepstow Wassail and the Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk Wassail at Newton Court both have all the elements you could want: a glass of cider, a good bonfire and horse monsters.
Watch a mummers’ play
On Boxing Day, across the UK, there are numerous performances of mummers’ plays – strange, formulaic little plays that involve bizarre costumes (the mummers of the Cotswold village of Marshfield dress entirely in torn strips of paper), often revolve around the murder and resurrection of one of the central characters and normally include a devil, who begs for money after the performance. Father Christmas can show up, too, but he tends to be wielding a sword, and is a far cry from his cheery, Santa-based self. Most of the plays we see today were based on ones written in the 17th century, but they all come with eerie strangeness.
Attend a krampus run
Every December, across Switzerland, southern Germany and Austria (and Whitby, if you’d prefer something a little closer to home), there are “krampus runs”, where performers dress in terrifying masks, huge horns (often more than 1m high) and costumes made of bulky pelts and rampage through the streets. Krampuses are punishers of the wicked – especially wicked children – and are led by the proto-Santa himself, St Nicholas – his dark antithesis, punishing the bad rather than rewarding the good.
Read ghost stories
The Victorian era saw the decline of the more nightmarish traditions, with the growing popularity of a family Christmas, spent at home with your loved ones and not drunkenly running through the streets in a horrible mask. But the darkness of Christmas endured in ghost stories, with Victorian writers, from MR James to Charles Dickens, penning horrific tales specifically for the season (including a Christmas Carol, with all of its ghostly visitations). Not only did they tie in nicely to the Victorian obsession with spiritualism, they allowed the darker side of Christmas to be embraced. Personal favourites include Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw (which even has a framing device of being a tale told on Christmas Eve), and MR James’s Whistle and I’ll Come to You My Lad (along with its fabulous 1968 BBC adaptation). Nothing is more Christmassy than a terrifying ghost story and a mug of mulled wine.
The Dead of Winter – The Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas by Sarah Clegg is out now at £14.99 (Granta). Buy it for £13.49 from guardianbookshop.com
