The Old Magic of Christmas

by Linda Raedisch

  Knecht Ruprecht is now more usually to be found in the company of St. Nicholas. He wears a black or brown robe with a pointed hood and in Catholic regions might carry a rosary. He is always bearded and often soot-smudged as well, though these are clearly the ashes of the penitent that streak his face. All in all, his foreboding presence is like that of Dickens’s Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come, but instead of pointing a bony finger, Knecht Ruprecht carries a bundle of birch twigs.

  Don’t let the monk’s robes fool you; Knecht Ruprecht’s name, from Old High German Hruodperaht, suggests that he was once the servant of the goddess “Perahta,” or Perchta.

  Other Nicholases

  One would imagine that St. Nicholas and his villainous sidekicks must occupy opposite ends of the spectrum, but this has not always been the case. The frightful and the benevolent came together, or had yet to part ways, in the furry person of the Pelznichol, who could be distinguished from his brother Pelzmartl only by name and timing of appearance. Close cousins to both were Ruklaus (Rough Claus) and Aschenklaus (Ashy Claus). All had been christened with variations of the saint’s name, but there was nothing saintly about them. They all liked to beat children with birch rods, except for Aschenklaus; in his hand the saint’s crosier had devolved into a walking stick to the top of which he had knotted a bag full of ashes. It was with this that he clobbered naughty children, turning them just as ashy as himself.

  These “Nicholases” all brought gifts as well as instruments of corporal punishment, but they never pressed the nuts and apples into the eager children’s hands; they strewed them over the ground or floor as the medieval Pelzmarten had done before them. This strewing may be one of the most ancient rituals of the season. In eastern Lithuania, the father of the house used to scatter different kinds of grain over the farmhouse floor on the Eve of Epiphany. The children gathered the grains in their laps, then sorted them to see which crop would fare best that year.

  The Dream of the Rod

  In the old days, most children experienced more than just the threat of a beating on St. Nicholas’ Eve. Before they could pick up their treats, it was compulsory to feel the sting of those birch twigs across the backs of their fingers. The apples and nuts that the Pelznichol brought have long been recognized as tokens of fertility, and so has the kiss of the lash. The birch rod, as wielded at Christmastime, functioned more as a magic wand than as an instrument of pain. From England to Austria, the apple trees themselves were beaten in winter, and they certainly hadn’t done anything wrong. Rather than being “beaten into submission,” the recipient of the blow was beaten into long life, good health, and productivity. In Finland to this day, Christmas Eve would not be complete without a good switching with a handful of leafy birch twigs in the sauna.

  Sometimes, the Pelznichol would simply scatter the rods along with the goodies, while the stealthier St. Nicholas will tie a few twigs to the gifts as a matter of course so that the child waking in the morning will know that he knows. In early Protestant Germany, the treats were tucked inside the bundle of rods left by the Christ Child. All of these token twigs may have survived from the very Christmaslike Roman festival of Kalends, when pagan Romans exchanged strenae to mark the beginning of the New Year in January. In later times, these strenae took the form of sweetmeats, little clay lamps, and coins bearing the double visage of the god Janus, but originally strenae were branches cut from a sacred laurel grove belonging to Strenia, goddess of vigor. The message conveyed by both the sticks and the more substantial gifts was the same: the giver wished the recipient to enjoy a year of light, warmth, wealth, good health, and good things to eat.

  Of course, none of this prevented nightmares of the dreaded rod from interfering with the sugar plums dancing in children’s heads as St. Nicholas Day approached. The Pelznichol eventually faded away, so in those regions that did not enjoy the services of a Krampus or Knecht Ruprecht, the saint himself was left holding the Rute,16 as it is called in German. It is only right that this magic wand should have passed at last into the hands of St. Nicholas, whose full title is St. Nicholas Thaumaturgus, a worker of wonders.

  European postcards of the Victorian era make it clear that the switch was nothing less than a ritual tool. While sometimes it is a simple bunch of birch twigs stripped of their leaves and bound once or twice with osiers at the base, it is just as often gilded or festooned with colorful little flags. It might be the size of a bottle brush or as bushy as a small tree. This year, as the fifth of December approaches, allow yourself to be inspired by the shopkeepers of central Europe who decorate their windows with birch twigs dressed up in tinsel and tiny white light bulbs. Done right, an oversized Rute can take the place of a tabletop Christmas tree. And nothing says “I know what you’ve been up to, but I love you anyway” like a bundle of twigs tipped with gold glitter and studded with chocolates.

  The Buttnmandl

  We turn now from the shop windows of the town to follow the jangle of cowbells up into the shadow of the Berchtesgadener Alps, where the very Sendakian rumpus starts on December 5. Even now, bobbing human bundles of straw known as Buttnmandln are descending through the twilight of St. Nicholas’ Eve to “surprise” their fellow villagers. Each Buttnmandl is strapped round the waist with three deafening cowbells—two small, one large—which can be heard more than a mile away, so there’s really no surprise at all. They are preceded by the good saint, a white-robed angel or Christ Child figure, and several devils dressed in furs and Krampus masks. Though the straw effectively obscures their faces, the Buttnmandln, too, wear masks. These ritual masks are known as Larven in German, instead of the more usual Masken. Larve comes from Latin larva, which denotes both a mask and an unquiet ghost.17

  Stopping at the first house in the village, St. Nicholas delivers his sermon and his gifts. Both the devils and the straw monsters try to wait patiently until the old man has finished, but a few of them can’t help twirling their long whips of braided leather. As soon as the saint has finished, they step in, grab whichever unmarried girls happen to be hanging about, carry them outside, and tumble them in the snow. Hint to the girls: though massive, the Buttnmandl is easily overpowered—knock him over and he can’t get up again. The fur-clad devils, however, are harder to outrun.

  Devils with outthrust tongues, young bachelors dressed as harvested stands of grain, brandishing long whips as they pursue their girlfriends: it’s hard to miss the fertility aspects of the Buttnmandllauf, which translates roughly as “Running of the Riddle-Raddle Men.” Happily, these living wheat sheaves are still running strong today. If you happen to be in the Berchtesgadener Alps on the evening of December 5 and hear the discordant ringing of cowbells, you’ll know you’ll soon be greeted by the sight of this rustling parade. Though both devils and Buttnmandln are blessed with holy water before they set out, they belong to a religion much older than Christianity. I think old Berchta, whose Alps these are, must be pleased at how well the monsters have held up.

  The Bells of St. Nicholas

  With the exception of Black Peter in his newfangled page’s costume, none of these frightful characters would think of leaving the house without their bells on. The wearing of bells and other jangling things is a universal means of protecting the wearer from evil or simply opportunistic spirits. There are those who would regard the copper bells sewn on a Siberian shaman’s tunic as the precursors of the harness bells worn by Santa’s reindeer, with the Pelznichol bridging the chronological gap. If you are going to follow that line of thinking, then you should probably also count Moses’s brother Aaron, whose priestly skirts were trimmed with little golden bells, among Santa’s direct ancestors.

  The truth is that with very little effort, a bell can be made to tinkle prettily or jangle incessantly: it makes music practically all by itself. This must have seemed nothing short of magic to the ancients, especially when we consider that bells are made of metal, a material that was itself brought into being through an apparently
magical process. Wherever there have been bells, they have been used to ward off unseen and undesirable influences.

  Because they wear bells, and because they spare not the rod with all its inherent blessings, we must accept the fact that these rough and often hideous creatures that come bounding out of the forest at the onset of winter are not at all evil. We have already witnessed the demotion of the god Woden to ghostly huntsman and watched the elves grow small. Could the attendants of St. Nicholas be cast-down fertility gods? Or do they descend from the Svartálfar, those dark elves about which Snorri Sturluson had so little to say? While they may never have ranked as high as the light elves, these dark spirits were apparently indispensable. Rather than force a tenuously Christianized community to do without them, the Church sprinkled them with holy water and incorporated them into the saint’s retinue, where they remain to this day.

  St. Nicholas’s triumphant entry into Amsterdam each year would seem strange without Black Peter loping along beside the bishop’s white horse. Children in Central Europe still hide under the furniture when Čert or Krampus comes tramping in, and German children hide behind their parents at the first glimpse of Knecht Ruprecht. As for the Pelznichol, he did not go quietly but got his rambunctious second wind in the New World.

  The Bellsnickle

  The Pelznichols were among the first dark Christmas spirits to make it to North America. As soon as they got off the boat, many of them doffed their fur coats and put on patched jackets instead. As the new spellings of their name attest, the most important part of the Bellsnickle’s, Bellschniggle’s, or Bellsneakle’s costume was now the harness of sleigh bells. Back in the Rhineland, they had already disentangled themselves from the date of December 6, which is, after all, a saint’s feast day and therefore not in the spirit of Protestantism. Those who were engaged to make house calls now did so on Christmas Eve.

  Also present in Nova Scotia and West Virginia, the Bellsnickle was the dominant strain in the eighteenth-to-early-nineteenth-century Pennsylvania Christmas. When the German Bellsnickles met up with the Celtic ritual of mumming, the two traditions merged, but the new one retained the name of “belsnickling.” Along with the Bellsnickle came the Christ-Kindel, whose name is a dialectical shortening of Christkindlein, the Baby Jesus, but who was usually imagined looking more like an angel. While in some parts of Pennsylvania the Christ-Kindel remained the silent, stealthy gift-giver whom good children expected to fill their baskets by Christmas morning, he eventually developed an alter-ego, the Kris Kinkle.18 Although the Kris Kinkle never gave up his name, he soon shed his white nightshirt for the Bellsnickle’s get-up: a makeshift mask or face blackened with burnt cork, a tow wig, and plenty of bells either sewn or strapped on.

  Adjectives used to describe these Bellsnickles and Kris Kinkles in the newspapers and diaries of the day include “hideous,” “horrid,” “frightful,” and “abominable.” Imagine such a face appearing at your window as darkness fell on Christmas Eve. The typical Bellsnickle announced his arrival by tapping at the glass pane with his fat birch switch or slender rod. Many of them also carried whips. The Bellsnickle always knew who had been naughty. When he entered the house, he scattered hard cookies and candies like chicken feed over the floor where the good children were allowed to gather them up. The other children had to dodge the switch or whip in order to snatch their prizes. At first, the Bellsnickle received no payment during his visit; the parents settled up with him behind the scenes. Under the influence of the mummers, however, the Bellsnickle, who was usually a teenage boy, began to expect wine, cider, cakes, and even money when he showed up at the door.

  Each neighborhood really only needed one Bellsnickle, but that did not stop other young men disguising themselves and roving the snowy countryside just for fun. Soon, the streets were filling up with young ruffians whom the townsfolk had begun to find annoying rather than enchanting. Once belsnickling lost its parental stamp of approval, it devolved into a Halloweenish gathering of local youths who rambled through the streets in off-the-rack costumes.

  The Yule Lads

  Iceland, too, has its share of frightful creatures roaming the farms at Advent, but they don’t start showing their faces until six days after St. Nicholas Day, which is a non-event in much of Scandinavia. They are the Jólasveinar, the “Yule Swains” or “Christmas Lads,” who begin their official invasion of Iceland on December 12. Thirteen days before Christmas, the first of these Yule Lads descends from the mountains, a new one appearing each day to hang about the farmstead or even the streets of Reykjavik until there are thirteen of them making merry on Christmas Day.

  If you look out the window after dark and see a trollish lad making faces back at you, that would be Window Peeper. Have the smoked mutton and skyr that you put aside for Christmas dinner disappeared? Blame Meat Hooker and Skyr Gobbler. Someone clattering among the dirty dishes in the sink? The culprits would be Pot Scraper, Spoon Licker, and Bowl Licker. You don’t have to guess what kind of mischief Skirt Blower likes to get up to, but some of the lads have more enigmatic names such as Door Sniffer, Candle Beggar, and Gully Gawk. While folklorist Jon Arnason standardized their number in 1864—before that there could be as many as twenty and as few as nine—their names still vary.

  In the Icelandic folktale “See My Grey Foot Dangle,” three children are left home alone while their parents attend church on Christmas Eve. They’ve each been given a candle and a pair of bright red socks, which they sit around admiring when a voice is heard out in the yard. The youngest and therefore most innocent child remarks that it must be Jesus who is calling to them through the window. The boy’s use of the holy name banishes the creature, who was not Jesus at all but a hairy, gray Icelandic troll who would surely have spirited one or more of the children away. Was this troll one of the Yule Lads? He might have been, for in the old days, the Yule Lads often had children on their grocery list.

  You can’t really blame the lads for their bad habits. Their parents were the trolls Gryla and Leppaludi, though Gryla may actually have borne them all out of wedlock. We don’t know much about Leppaludi, but Gryla was a great eater of children. The Christmas Lads have been around since at least the 1600s, and the years have been kind to them. They used to be ogres as terrible as their parents but are now merely oafish. These days, they like to dress like Santa Claus and are inclined to bring presents instead of carrying children off and dropping them in their mother’s pot. In the 1920s, Icelandic children started placing their shoes in the window anytime after December 12 in the expectation that the Yule Lads would fill them.

  Goblins at the Window

  Although it was not written down until a month after the fact, the following incident occurred on or around November 21, 1933, according to Father Nicholas Christmas, who included it in a letter to the children of J. R. R. Tolkien in December of that year. (The letter can now be read by all in the book Letters from Father Christmas, edited by Baillie Tolkien.) On the night in question, Father Christmas was woken by a disturbing “squeak and spluttering” in his bedroom, followed by the appearance of a “wicked little face” at the window, which was some distance above the ground. There was no doubt about it: the old man’s Cliff House was under attack from bat-riding

  goblins.

  In the Scandinavian literature of which Tolkien was so fond, the goblins are always hungry for treasure. In the Norwegian tale “The Christmas Visitors at Kvame,” the goblin chieftain, Old Trond, brings his own silver goblets to the party at a Norwegian farmhouse and is only parted from his treasures when he is shot dead in the High Seat.19 Old Trond would have been subordinate to the Goblin King, who lived in Sweden and presided over a considerably larger hoard of golden chalices, coins, and plates. The nastier the goblin, the greater the hoard, and the Norwegian jutul was the nastiest of all. On Christmas Eve, if you were brave enough to venture into the mountains, you could see glow of the jutul’s treasure-heap blazing out from the cracks in the rock fac
e with the brilliance of a thousand candles.

  The goblins of the North Pole, however, are mad for toys—especially the toys Father Christmas stores in the cellars of his Cliff House. In fact, they will do anything to get their clumsy black paws on the train sets and are apparently untroubled by the steel components, unlike their more traditional cousins who cannot tolerate iron in any of its forms. As Father Christmas reports to the children, the use of green smoke had failed to eradicate the goblins the year before, and now they’ve grown especially bold.

  In none of the Scandinavian tales do the goblins have wings, nor do those besieging the Cliff House. When Father Christmas glimpses them in the darkness outside his window, he comes to the immediate conclusion that they are riding on bats. Why bats? Why not some more plausible species such as the snowy owl or a high-stepping Arctic hare? Although rare—F. C.’s staff had not seen a goblin on a bat since 1453—the bat-riding Christmas spirit is not without precedent.

  When Father Christmas, with the help of his compatriots, Polar Bear and the Red Gnomes, finally got the upper hand and drop-kicked the goblins’ noxious little corpses out the door, he sat down to paint a picture of the battle, which is how we know that the North Pole goblins are soot-black, the usual color of troublesome Christmas spirits as well as a few of the beneficent ones. John Grossman’s album of antique postcards, Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas, includes the antitheses of these polar goblins: a handful of rosy-cheeked angelic little boys riding their own bridled bats—noctules and pipistrelles, by the looks of them. Each chubby boy is wearing a jockey’s outfit and holding what appears to be a peacock feather. They are coming to wish us all a “bright New Year,” but the tiny white wings sprouting from their backs are the only even faintly seasonal symbol in sight. (The wings naturally raise the question of why these boys need to be riding bats at all!)