Uncover the dark side of Christmas with these scary traditions

With October long gone and high streets already ablaze with Christmas tat, Halloween spooks may seem far behind us. But perhaps that’s to misunderstand the nature of the coming season: a festival of light that apparently has darkness - and a swarm of terrifying monsters - at its heart. For much of European history, writes Sarah Clegg, midwinter revelry was underpinned by menace and The Dead of Winter offers an entertaining guide to some of our ancestors’ scariest seasonal traditions.

The front cover presages the terrors to come. In one corner lurks the Krampus – a cloven-hooved beast who skulks behind the gift-bearing St Nicholas, ready to whack naughty little Austrians with his switch. That candle-lit crone may be Gryla – an Icelandic ogress who eats children at Christmastime.

As for those gleaming baubles, look closer and you’ll see they hang from the jaws of grinning horse skulls: ghastly apparitions that stalk Welsh villages in January. Called Mari Lwyds, those equine spectres are actually dressed-up humans who rampage through wassailing celebrations, knocking on doors to demand food, drink or money. And if this reminds you of the wee ghosties who gathered on your doorstep last October 31 - well, it turns out that guising is a time-honoured festive tradition across much of the northern hemisphere.

In Poland, Romania, Finland and north-east Germany, revellers are assailed by performers dressed as stags, goats and other horned beasts. Meanwhile, costumes and masks are integral to the Venice Carnival, which, although it occurs several weeks after Twelfth Night, shares seasonal origins.

(Image: Granta Books)

Clegg traces the roots of these shenanigans back to the Roman festival of Saturnalia: a time when established social conventions and hierarchies were suspended. Banned practices such as gambling were permitted and commoners became notional kings for the duration of the fair. Later, as centuries passed an Saturnalia gave way to Christmas and associated saints’ days, its anarchic spirit found echoes in the Feast of Fools, Twelfth Night and numerous other fetes characterised by mischief-making, cross-dressing and the temporary ennoblement of underlings.

Nor was it all harmless fun. Amid the chaos, “things were let loose that could not be restrained” and occasionally, blood was spilled. Little wonder, then, that such mayhem was eventually banned. Even guising, we learn, was outlawed in Elgin during the 16th century. Other riotous customs simply ebbed away.

Recent decades have seen a resurgence of these old traditions, so that the ghouls that haunted our forebears are abroad once more - and Clegg is determined to meet them. Her book reads partly as a kind of seasonal travelogue as she journeys across Europe in search of midwinter chills. On December 5, she joins a Krampus run in Salzburg, where hulking horned beasts frighten children and swat bypassers with sticks. In Gloucestershire, she attends a Boxing Day mummers play featuring stabbings, resurrections and a cast including Beelzebub and the Grim Reaper.

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In Helsinki at twilight on St Lucy’s Day (December 13), she witnesses a young girl being crowned with a magnificent candle wreath. Yet even this uplifting vision sets her pondering upon the unruly female forces once thought to have stravaiged through midwinter: Christmas “witches” who flew about at night in screeching packs, sometimes disembowelling children before stuffing their insides with straw.

Surprisingly, any notion that the mischief and magic surrounding Christmas traditions are vestiges of millennia-old, pre-Christian beliefs is debunked. Clegg, who has a PhD in ancient history, says there’s no evidence for this theory, which she attributes to the imaginations of 19th-century folklorists such as Jacob Grimm, who “determined that the Christmas witches were once pagan goddesses of winter”.

As for Grimm’s Scottish counterpart James Frazer, author of the hugely influential The Golden Bough: A Study in Magic and Religion, he’s accused of making “wild, unsubstantiated” assumptions about the “peasants” who are the supposed repositories for the ancient superstitions of their forefathers. Certainly, “threads of folklore can stretch back for millennia”, but those myths are constantly evolving. So why must we assume Frazer’s “peasants” were slavishly repeating solemn rituals, instead of crediting them with the creativity to invent and embellish stories for the sheer fun of it?

Christmas is indisputably a celebration of light. But, writes Clegg, don’t we also want to glory in its opposite, “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”? That, she suggests, is exactly what Victorian writers such as Charles Dickens were doing when they resurrected the Christmas ghost story in an era that had tried to tame this wild festival into a demure round of family gatherings and parlour games. Today, she writes, we crave this darkness more than ever, partly as a foil to the “cloyingly twee commercialisation” of contemporary celebrations.

(Image: Gallery Press)

Perhaps that’s why the Christmas ghost story is being revived anew. Galley Beggar Press has released Pocket Ghosts: three classic tales presented in neat, stocking-friendly editions. They include Charles Dickens’s last great ghost story, The Signalman, which was inspired by a terrible accident he witnessed during a train journey.

Muriel Spark’s devastatingly witty The Leaf-Sweeper tells the unsettling story of a man bent on abolishing Christmas, who ends up being haunted by himself. And Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Old Nurse’s Story is the archetypal creepy-house tale, complete with a ghostly organ that plays itself and corridors echoing with family secrets. In the end, we are reminded that the horrors people visit upon each other are more dreadful than anything lurking in the shadows of the occult.

And that, perhaps, explains the allure of the festive fright. As Sarah Clegg points out, scaring ourselves silly with horrors that are “of our own making” is peculiarly comforting, especially if it’s done by a cosy hearth amid the twinkle of fairy lights. With this in mind, The Dead of Winter offers the perfect antidote to the surfeit of saccharine guff that assails us at this time of year. Clegg’s descriptions of glittering markets, moonlit churchyards and Venetian carnivals are wonderfully atmospheric and her book is brim-full of entertaining facts and challenging ideas. It’s a cracking read.