by Keri O’Shea
At this time of year, you invariably hear a great deal about keeping the ‘true meaning’ of Christmas: it’s too schmaltzy, it’s too commercial, it isn’t what it was… well, it certainly isn’t what it was, but the idea that Christmas has always been a peaceable Christian festival is just plain incorrect. In fact, down through the years, Christmas has encompassed practices which are anywhere from unsettling to scary – as Andy McQuade pointed out in his great article about the BBC’s Ghost Story for Christmas phenomenon, at the darkest time of the year, a time which would have frozen or starved our ancestors to death, there was a lot to be scared about, and this informed how people celebrated the festival. When everything was turned on its head – the days short, the nights long – people wanted distraction, but the ever-present fear borne of the uncertainty of the season often saw this distraction take bizarre, scary form. For all the traditions of good cheer and plenty, there were reminders of the precariousness of the season to go along with them. Here are just a few of those from the British tradition, although I’m sure other countries have their fair share…
Mari Lwyd
I’m proud that one of the most bizarre Christmas practices stems from the area of Wales where I grew up. Imagine, if you will, there’s a knock at the door on Christmas Eve. Probably carol singers, right? Wrong. What you see when you open the door is… a horse’s skull, towering above you, its eyes lit by candles, and a cowl thrown over its head. Accompanying the skeletal horse is a band of men, their faces blackened. They want to come in…
Believe it or not, this is the Mari Lwyd (‘grey mare’) tradition, which still takes place in parts of Wales at this time of year. No one is exactly sure why the Welsh took to affixing horse skulls (or, sometimes, wooden replicas) atop poles and carrying them door to door, although there is some suggestion that it’s a hangover from a pagan rite. Wherever it stems from, the usual procedure is that the mari and her followers go door to door throughout the night, singing songs and versifying. They challenge householders to try to best them in song or verse, and ask for a tribute in the form of food or ale before they leave. Before any of this, though, the mari lwyd causes absolute mayhem, often dashing around and trying to bite people once it is allowed indoors (and it nearly always is – I mean, would you argue with a seven foot disembodied horse skull?) If there’s a replica skull being used rather than a real one, then nails will have been hammered into its jaws to act as teeth. Just so people don’t miss out.
Dumb Cake
How about this for a creepy superstition? In parts of England, a girl would fast on Christmas Eve, but bake a ‘dumb cake’, onto which she would prick her initials. The cake would be left near the fireplace overnight, and the door to the room had to be left open. It had to be left open, because what was about to happen was this: her future husband’s doppelganger was going to climb in through a window, and add his initials to the dumb cake. He would then escape through the open door: shutting the door meant trapping the double, and the results would be dire…
Evergreens
One of the few Christmas traditions which have been a constant since pre-Christian times, evergreens like holly, ivy and mistletoe are still used today to decorate homes. Thankfully we don’t always do with them what our ancestors did, though. Mistletoe, which has had sacred significance since the days of the Druids, was often hung over cribs to ward off faery folk who – for reasons best known to themselves – always seem to want to steal human offspring. It was also worn around the neck in parts of Staffordshire to repel witches. Perhaps it is best known, though, for being hung in a doorway, underneath which couples kiss for good luck: this may be an echo of its former sexual significance to our pagan forebears. Holly, another charm for warding off wickedness, was sometimes used as a cure for chilblains: this was rather unkindly done by thrashing the affected area with the leaves. If that isn’t a gruelling enough treatment for you, then consider its use as a cure for worms: an old English recipe recommended the sufferer to yawn over a bowl containing sage and holly leaves, at which point the worms would drop out of his or her mouth. Ivy was also fearsome to witches, but amongst its other uses it served as a divinatory tool: a leaf was floated in a dish of water and left there until Twelfth Night, at which time its condition would tell you what sort of year lay ahead. Black spots foretold illness, and general decay in the leaf meant you were probably going to die during the coming year.
Of course, the evergreens had to be disposed of in a correct, timely fashion. The vicar of a church in Devon wrote of what could occur if this wasn’t done properly:
Down with the rosemary and so,
Down with the baies and mistletoe,
Down with the holly, ivie, all,
Wherewith ye drest the Christmas hall.
That so the superstitious find
Not one least branch there left behind,
For look, how many leaves there be,
Neglected there, maids trust to me
So many goblins you shall see.
Lords of Misrule and Mumming
If you start partying at Halloween and keep it going until Christmas, then you are in good company. An old custom – with roots very firmly in the Roman festival of Saturnalia, where slaves and masters swapped roles – is the Lord of Misrule phenomenon, which started in the late medieval period. Someone would be voted as the Lord at Halloween; he would then be master of ceremonies until the New Year, and this invariably involved generating as much anarchy and chaos as possible: games and plays would be organised, costumes would be worn, all at the behest of the Lord – much to the exasperation of the local clergy. To be fair, it did often get quite messy, and participants thought nothing of marching into church to disrupt the services, often dressed in drag and completely drunk. The next time someone tells you we should do Christmas like it used to be, then you can do the above and no one can contradict you. Tradition: it’s a fine thing indeed. Also in the vein of performances, the ‘mumming plays’ were and remain in practice throughout Britain during the Christmas period. Although the plays vary from area to area, they all contain a certain amount of the grotesque: St. George and good old Beelzebub are stock characters who regularly appear, and when St. George is killed in battle he is revived, mad-scientist style, by the machinations of ‘The Doctor’ who also regularly appears. Oh, but in Llangynwyd in Wales, the chief mummer routinely wore – you’ve guessed it – a horse’s skull!
These are just a few examples of a wide range of oddball traditions which have been historically practiced in the British Isles; one thing’s for sure, though, there is no one ‘true meaning’ of Christmas. It changes, as people change. If anything, we’re unusual these days, in our centrally-heated, well-lit homes, for not seeing this time of year as distinctly ambiguous, as worrisome as it is welcome. But, hey, we’ve always got Brutal as Hell to remind us that there still just might be something sinister out there this festive season…