A short review of a short book. I bought Sarah Clegg's The Dead of Winter last year as a Christmas present for family, and my December trip back home this year gave me the chance to read it for myself.
This is a delicious little Christmas treat. Concise but intelligent, witty but respectful, moralising but without preaching overmuch, and anecdotal while staying on point, Clegg has written something of near-perfect balance. She takes us on a tour of the darker side of Christmas : Krampus, Mari Llwyd, witches, Wild Hunts, Saturnalia and more are all found within. She describes visiting empty churches in the depths of winter with the haunting tone it requires, without skimping on the need for comic relief and self-awareness. The book neither takes itself too seriously nor pokes excessive fun at rituals which are frequently bizarre.
The term I think I'm looking for here is cosy horror. There's a sense of danger about some of the celebrations, which on occasion result in real injury and serious threat. Children, in the more exuberent festivities which still take place, are in danger of nothing more than being scared, but for adults the threat is just enough to give it a real edge. Clegg herself comes off rather badly injured after being whipped by a Krampus in Vienna, at once drawn to the otherworldly and repelled by the danger. If ever there was a case of a moth to a flame, here it is.
Clegg is not afraid to draw attention to the less-than-wholesome aspects of these sometimes anarchic rituals. Not only does the make-believe violence occasionally flare into something considerably worse than scaring children, but there's an element of misogyny and racism in some of the events. Clegg is, of course, absolutely right to point this out, but the ambiguity, the tension in being fascinated and attracted by the forbidden fruit of base impulse, while at the same time repelled by the knowledge that some of this is really very wrong, makes the text a compelling read. It's a conflict which cannot be fully resolved, only explored. Clegg yearns for the violent, almost lusts for the devilish and the macabre, but at the same time would love to curl up with a nice cup of cocoa and a large friendly cat in front of a small fire.
Perhaps it's a question of aesthetics. Perhaps we're drawn to the look of a thing, our fantasy of how it should be, not its reality. We want to be scared but not really harmed; ravished (and there is a tone of sexuality here) but with consent. It feels like there's more than a hint about something with much wider implications than the sociological history of Christmas.
And Clegg does raise some good points about the sociology of the thing. In particular, she notes that folklorists in the modern era have tended to an elitist, academic perspective, fascinated by their subject matter but disparaging of its adherents. The general peasantry, they said, was essentially stupid, stagnant, and unimaginative, simultaneously both living in a pre-industrial utopia and yet also barbarous savages. Bereft of any original ideas, all of their ritual customs must surely be matters of the utmost seriousness, direct vestiges of ancient pagan rites. Heaven forbid they should have done anything just for pure fun, let alone invent anything new. The nobel savage fallacy looms large.
A permanent question that comes to mind whenever I read books of folklore and mythology is whether people really ever believed in the ideas originally. And of course, it's abundantly clear that this question is both impossible to fully answer and often completely the wrong thing to ask. Ancient pagan beliefs were malleable in the extreme, and the idea that modifying it would make it untrue just didn't feature in the world view.
Nevertheless, some aspects of the rituals which survive today, and of those practised in the relatively recent past, do seem to have credible connections to the pre-Christian era. Christmas certainly seems to have developed from truly ancient midwinter festivals; their are hints that Mari Llwyd (the rap-battling horse skull of Welsh tradition) has ancient roots despite waxing and waning in popularity over time. But if there was always something like Krampus, there's no evidence of Krampus ever being a god. Some beliefs were taken extremely seriously (witches were, after all, executed), but others... well, not so much.
Indeed the violence, directed at children, is sometimes so extreme that there's an element of teasing about the whole thing. Krampus eats children, which is hardly a credible threat; various witches go much further : they disembowel children, wrap their entrails around a pole and stuff them with straw. This hideous imagery is perhaps terrifying enough to snap an unruly child into conformity without needing to make good on the threat (beyond perhaps a good slap, back in unenlightened eras). There's an edge of danger there but limited, analogous, maybe, to an iron fist in a velvet glove.
It's often said that Christmas is a celebration of the light – a way of driving out the darkness of midwinter, but I think we want to celebrate the darkness as well, to plunge ourselves into it, use it to make things that are as excitingly horrifying as they can be, to fill the night with monsters and scares that take full advantage of the longer, deeper darkness, and enjoy all the terrifying possibilities it brings, knowing deep down that it's a horror of our own making, and can be – just about – controlled. This is horror as entertainment – horror to be relished. There's too much fun in the monsters for them to be solely representations of a genuine fear, too much joy in the subversive excitement of rampaging through the night, whether as a witch, Krampus or snapping monsters, too much laughter mingling with the screams that echo through the centuries.
Yet even Santa has his darker side, giving coal to naughty children : it's hardly an image of child-devouring savagery, but it still makes him a less than pure figure. Embodying the negative aspects with their own personas, says Clegg, makes the joyous spirits of Christmas all the more potent. Just as Protestantism put all its sinful eggs in Satan's singular basket, making one supreme evil in place of a multitude of others, so perhaps Krampus et al. let Santa or St Nicholas rise to their status of paragons of virtue. Devils, in short, make the gods better.
Not that this was usually done consciously. Things were invented and modified and lost because things just felt right at the moment. Rather than being the literal survival of pagan traditions, many aspects were the result more of pagan tendencies : the flexibility of belief, the creativity in mixing demonic horror with the wholesomeness of being with friends and family. There was little or no alternative religion to Christianity in medieval Europe, but this didn't mean the old ways were gone completely. The yearning to give physical shape to our hopes and fears is simply too strong to suppress entirely. Paganism, perhaps, is less of a religion and more the default state of humanity.
It's delightfully ironic that folklore is so dynamic that it happily absorbed a story about it being entirely static and unchanging just because it happened to be a very good story.
And these new ideas did something else as well – they made the Christmas monsters frightening again, just at a time when the darker side of Christmas practises were, to some extent, dying out... To the people who were unlikely to believe in a real demon, the idea that Krampus carried with him millennia of bloody death allowed him to retain a huge portion of the exciting terror he might otherwise have lost.
This is fakelore again : a belief that other people believed a ritual somehow gives it extra validity of a sort. The idea that people were at some point genuinely terrified of Krampus, even knowing the idea is pure nonsense, nevertheless gives the idea an altogether sharper edge than thinking it was only ever for amusement (archaeologists in particular are often prone to saying "ritual" as though this could only ever be a serious and solemn event).
Eliminating Christmas horror proved impossible for the Church, but not through lack of trying. Far more successful than the Puritan attempt at cancel culture was the Victorian establishment approach of taming Christmas and making it family friendly. By giving people activities which they actually wanted to do, allowing them time off to be with friends and eat themselves silly (as opposed to just berating them for not praying hard enough), the need for noisily prowling the streets threatening violence in exchange for food and drink receded.
Even then, the belief that there's something dangerous in the darkest depths of midwinter never fully died. Perhaps a resurgence in Christmas horror is a result of a failing social contracts, perhaps it's just because it's bloody good fun. We need outlets for our baser tendencies. Even if we're consciously aware of it, the urge to go – for a limited time – beyond the social norms, with at least some reduction in the consequences, may be truly irresistible. If the exact beliefs aren't truly ancient, the most basic idea may be something that's literally a permanent feature of humanity.
