The Yule Horse
Had Hansel and Gretel ventured into the forest surrounding the Ilsenstein at Christmastime instead of at Midsummer, as they do in nineteenth-century composer Engelbert Humperdinck’s opera, they might have run into the Habersack. As Yuletide horse get-ups go, the Habersack is one of the easiest to make. All you need is a broom, a forked branch to hold the bristled end up, and a white sheet to hide under. Since the effect is more that of a horned beast than a horse, the north German Habersack may originally have been a goat like the Scandinavian Yule Buck. In Yorkshire, no Christmas used to be complete without a ram, namely, the Old Derby Tup, while not far away, chimerical Oosers and Woosets stalked the moors, walking upright and wearing both beards and antlers. But the most enduring Christmas animal disguise is the horse.
Hobi in Old French is a robust little horse. A hobby-horse is a carved wooden horse’s head set on a wooden frame covered by a cloth or caparison. It is indeed smaller than the average, real-life horse. The “rider” stands inside the framework so that he appears to be mounted on the horse. There is really nothing ghostly, or Christmassy, about the hobby-horse. The Elizabethans included it in their Yuletide frivolities simply because it was so very festive, but they also enjoyed it at other times of the year. Because he was in such demand, and because hobbying required special skills—the swerve the dart, the lunge—a fellow could actually make a living as a professional hobby-horse. But the hobby-horse is just one element of a public festival or, as in Elizabethan times, a lavish private pageant. Most hobby-horses now come out only in May and September.
There is another more primitive sort of horse that makes the rounds at Christmastime. It goes by many names in many different places, but these regional variations all have a few things in common. First of all, each consists of some representation of a horse’s head mounted on a broomstick or other long pole. Viking re-enactors will be reminded of the scorn-pole, a horse’s head and hide staked on a pole, which was used both as a public insult and to effect curses. Since its domestication, the horse has been an important and often indispensable animal. Wherever and whenever there are horses, they are venerated in one way or another. The Yule Horse conveys blessings, though it may throw in an insult or two in the process.
The actor playing the Yule Horse walks upright, if a little stooped, his body entirely covered by a sheet. Unlike the hobby-horse, the Yule Horse is not usually part of a play or dance but travels with his own band of mummers. Horses will be horses, so there is often some sort of sweeper bringing up the rear. All Yule Horses expect something for their trouble, such as food, drink, or cash.
Yule horses like to clack their jaws and charge at their hosts, but the Welsh Mari Llwyd is the only one who ever catches anyone. The Mari Llwyd, or “Gray Mare,” is an actual horse’s skull, not a carved puppet’s head. A white sheet may be attached to the crown of the skull or the whole skull may be “gift-wrapped” tightly in the sheet so that the lower jaw can be made to open and close. An exposed skull can also be painted black, but the sheet covering the actor is always white. Why is she called a gray mare when she is white? Horsey people refer to apparently white horses as “grays” because the skin underneath the white coat is gray. Perhaps the Mari Llwyd was supposed to be gray, but no self-respecting nineteenth-century Welsh housewife would have allowed her son or husband to go parading around town in a less than blindingly white sheet.
The Mari Llwyd’s eyes are made of colored glass-bottle bottoms, and her mane consists of wisps of dark horsehair bound with colorful ribbons, clapper bells, rickrack, tinsel, and whatever else you can think of. No one pretends to ride the Mari Llwyd; her “handler” walks beside her. On arriving outside each house, the mare and her attendants sing a song, asking to come in. The people inside reply, in verse, through the window or cracked door. The answer is always “No.” This goes on back and forth until one side runs out of rhymes. Whichever side wins, the mare and her party always make it over the threshold, where they are offered cakes and glasses of cider. Upon departure, the mare bestows blessings for the coming year. One of her Welsh names meant “gray-beaked bird”—yet another incarnation, perhaps, of the part-avian winter goddess.
Ireland had its own Lair Bhan, or “white mare,” which appeared at Christmas, while the Manx Laare Vane cantered into the parlor at the close of the New Year’s Eve dinner. The Laare Vane’s head was not a real horse’s skull but a wooden one painted white. The Laare Vane’s visit had something for everyone. First, the horse chased the girls, then the horse’s attendants performed a stick dance followed by a short mummer’s play that ended with the very Celtic sacrifice of a (theatrically) severed head. The program concluded with the Laare Vane’s predictions for the coming year.
The Kentish Hoodening (pronounced “oodening” because the actor wears “an hood”) Horse is the Anglo-Saxon version of the Yule Horse. He does not differ much from the Celtic. The head may be a real skull or a carved hollow head in which a lit candle used to be placed. Either way, the eye sockets are left empty. The head is trimmed with a woolly mane, ribbon rosettes, bells, and the like. If you prefer black, the Old Horse, who shared his territory with the ovine Old Tup, will be more to your taste. Here, the bottle-glass eyes were set in a pony’s skull that had been painted a shiny black and decorated with pompoms and braided yarn. The actor was covered by black burlap or tarp and was attended by six men with blackened faces. Though he began life as a Yule Horse, the Old Horse eventually defected to Eastertide.
The Yule Horse is now an endangered species. If you want to help keep the tradition alive, start saving your old sheets, brooms, ribbons, yarn, and bits and bobs. If you are not lucky enough to live where all manner of skulls lie bleaching in the sagebrush, you can go the easier Habersack route. Add a few clear or blue battery-powered Christmas lights under the sheet for ghostly effect, and after the first few house calls, your Yule Horse will have paid for itself.
The Yule Buck
From Sanskrit to Welsh to Middle English, the word buck, or a variant thereof, meant “male goat” long before it was applied to a male deer. The Scandinavian terms Julebukk (Danish, Norwegian) and Julbock (Swedish) are still often translated as “Yule Buck” instead of the more modern-sounding “Christmas billy goat.” Since Christian times, the goat has been identified with the Devil, perhaps because it was the mascot of the immensely popular god Thor, later demonized by the church along with the rest of the Norse pantheon. The Yule Buck, however, is older than Thor. Somewhere on the way out of its Indo-European homeland, the word bukka also came to describe a mischievous, horned spirit, as in the Irish pooka, the Baltic puk, Shakespeare’s Puck, and, possibly, the English spook. This supernatural Indo-European baggage eventually made its way into Finland, where we find the goat-man-turned-Santa Claus, Joulupukki.
A silent straw Julbock is usually the first thing you see when you enter a Swedish Christmas market. As you peruse the stalls with your mug of hot spiced wine, you’ll spot another and another of his genus, some small enough to fit in your hand, others big enough to fill your front window. Apart from their size, all Yule Bucks look pretty much alike these days: bundles of rye straw bound with red ribbon, the beard represented by a few bristling ears of grain, the braided horns curving back over the withers. If you decide to buy one, you’ll be investing in a very old tradition indeed.
In the old days, a Julbock could also be a man dressed up as a goat in hide, horns, and shaggy goatee. Until the late nineteenth century, the goat or goat-man was the principal Christmas gift-bringer in Nordic lands. Originally, the Yule Buck came not to hand out parcels but to accept offerings from the family in return for a bountiful harvest. If no gifts were forthcoming, he would crash around the hall, stamping his hooves and threatening the children with his horns. In order to make an especially infernal impression, the old-fashioned Julbock might hold a bundle of smoldering tow between his teeth. In Usedom in northeastern Germany, the office of Yule Buck w
as carried out by the Klapperbock, a kind of Habersack with clattering jaws. The Klapperbock terrorized those children who could not recite their prayers. Although he jettisoned his shaggy coat and horns long ago in favor of Santa Claus’s red-and-white faux fur, Finland’s gift-giver still goes by the ancient name of Joulupukki. In the early twentieth century, he started riding a bike to speed up his rounds on Christmas Eve. Sometimes, he went by so fast that he didn’t even stop but threw the presents in the door, paperboy-style.
Even if you couldn’t see him, it was expected that the Yule Buck would enter the house at some point on Christmas Eve. So as not to disappoint him, Norwegian children left a shoe-full of barley grains for him under the bed. In the area of Elverum in southeastern Norway, he was believed to spend Christmas Eve prognosticating under the dinner table. He was always gone by Christmas morning, but if he left a few plump grains behind in his place, it was a sign of a good harvest to come.
Having discharged his gift-giving duties, the Yule Buck then disappeared, popping up again at Epiphany (January 6) in Norway and Denmark to trot along behind the Star Boys as they paraded through the streets singing carols and holding a paper lantern aloft to represent the Star of Bethlehem. The very latest you could expect to run into a Yule Buck was St. Knut’s Day (January 13), when he came knocking once more. The “Knut Buck,” or Nuuttipukki as he was called in Finland, might have looked like a goat, but he drank like a man, and you had better give him as much beer as he wanted if you hoped to prosper in the new year.
Before you decide that the straw Julbock you brought home from the Christmas market is completely harmless, you should know about a handful of Scandinavian tales in which he plays a principal role. In one of them, a girl attending a Christmas Eve party takes a straw goat-man, which the other guests have been throwing around in a game of keep-away, and begins to dance with it. As the clock strikes twelve, the straw figure comes to life, rustling his partner back and forth across the parlor floor to the horror of the other partygoers. By the time they realize he is no devil in disguise but the Devil himself, it is too late; the goat-man has disappeared, taking the girl with him.
The Yule Boar
In the Viking and early medieval eras, the kept pig was not much different in appearance or attitude from its cousin the wild boar. Both were regarded with great reverence, in part because of the sharpness of their tusks. A whole pig, or its head, was the centerpiece of the Nordic Yule feast, while in Lithuania, it was the task of the one left behind on Christmas Eve to make a special stew with a pig’s tail sticking out of it. In Germany, too, and in the Slavic lands to the east, the pig or boar was a staple of the old Christmas feast.
Yule pork was sacred food. In Sweden, the leftover meat was salted or dried and put away until plowing time, when it was either turned into the earth or given to the plowman and horses to eat. Sometimes, the Yule Boar was actually a loaf of bread shaped like a boar, incorporating the last grains of the harvest. Both boars and pigs act as efficient living plows as they snuffle their way through the forest in search of acorns and truffles. This churning of mulch and mast into the earth is essential to its ability to support new growth, which is probably why the boar was the signature animal of the Norse fertility god Frey. Once slaughtered, a nicely fattened pig also provided much of what a household would need to get it through the winter: sausages, salt pork, tripe, and tallow for making soap and candles. Frey himself owned a gold-bristled boar that pulled him around in a cart. Though a living creature, this Gullinbursti had been fashioned for the god by the dwarves. Today, Gullinbursti’s descendants are made of golden marzipan and sold in little cellophane bags as good luck charms at New Year’s.
That takes care of the pig on top of the table; in Sweden, if you weren’t careful, there might be another one underneath it. She was the Gloso, or “glowing sow,” and if you knew what was good for you, you would leave three stalks of wheat standing in the field at harvest time as an offering to her. You might also set out a bowl of porridge and a few fish heads for her to consume as she passed by on Christmas Eve. You could see the Gloso coming from a long way off, for her eyes burned like coals and her bristling back shed sparks as she moved. If she found the offerings too paltry, she would stay on to haunt the dark space under the tablecloth throughout the Twelve Nights of Christmas.
One of the many nicknames of Frey’s twin sister Freya was Sýr, meaning “sow.” Was Sweden’s glowing sow a relic of the old fertility goddess’s worship? Perhaps, for the cult of a Yuletide goddess once extended far beyond the borders of Sweden, as evinced by Perchta’s midwinter ramblings. Likewise, the Gloso was not the only ghostly pig trotting about at this time of year. In Switzerland, the appearance of a flying sow heralded the coming of rough winter weather. Sometimes, she and her piglets arrived on the heels of the Wild Hunt.
In the Middle Ages, there was a widespread belief that a mother who killed her own children would return in the shape of a sow, her unshriven children trailing her as little striped piglets. In Sweden, the Gloso herself was sometimes supposed to be an utkasting, the ghost of a baby born out of wedlock and exposed to the elements immediately after birth. In the Faeroe Islands, such an infant ghost was known as a niðagrisur, a “pig from below.” In addition to Christmas, these restless spirits often showed up at the weddings of their mothers or more fortunate siblings to lament their tragic fates.
And then again, the glowering sow may only have been the stunned ghost of a pig who had enjoyed a choice diet and the best of care all year, only to fall to the axe just before Christmas.
The Yule Cat
The first cat to appear in the days before Christmas was the Icelandic Jólaköttur, or “Yule Cat,” whose favorite dish was lazy human. Since there are no wild feline predators in Iceland, the Yule Cat was probably an oversized version of the bushy Norwegian forest cats that pulled the goddess Freya’s wagon through the sky.
The Yule Cat began his prowl in the autumn when everyone was supposed to be doing the heavy work involved in stocking up for the long winter. First, there was the haymaking, then the slaughter of whichever animals could not be kept through the winter, after which the meat had to be smoked and stored. The rest of the sheep’s wool that had been shorn in the spring had to be spun, then knitted or woven into new garments for everyone in the household.
Anyone who did not pitch in would not get his or her yearly payment of new clothes at Christmas. The maid or farmhand who was still walking around in frayed skirts or holey trousers on Christmas Day was said to “go to the Christmas Cat,” because the state of their clothes marked them as a tasty meal for the Jólaköttur.
The Werewolf
It was once believed that children born on Christmas Day were able to see spirits. Those born on any of the Twelve Days or Nights of Christmas, however, stood a good chance of becoming werewolves. In Romania, werewolves might also be born in September, the consequence of their parents giving in to the temptations of the flesh during Advent, which, in the Middle Ages, was supposed to be a season of penitence.
“The Wolves are Running,” is the ominous watchphrase in John Masefield’s 1935 children’s novel, The Box of Delights, which opens at the beginning of the school Christmas holidays. Those who speak it are not referring to Canis lupus but to werewolves. The Christmas werewolf may reflect a transference of the Roman Lupercalia from the ides of February to Yule. Lupercalia was the Roman Mother’s Day, a feast to celebrate the she-wolf who suckled Romulus and Remus. J. K. Rowling carries on the Christmas werewolf tradition in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, when Remus Lupin discusses his “furry little problem” with Harry over eggnog on Christmas Eve.
At one time, this Season of the Wolf stretched all the way from Martinmas, when the Pelzmarten donned his wolf skin, through Epiphany when the Wise Men finally arrived and banished the beasts. Latvian and Lithuanian werewolves started running amok on St. Lucy’s Eve (December 12), while the shaggy black kal
likantzaroi, identified by one German scholar as Turkish werewolves, descended on southern Greek homes on Christmas Eve. Wolves, like humans, are social animals, so it should come as no surprise that werewolves like to get together for the holidays. In Baltic lands, they gathered on Christmas night to feast on rustled cattle, washing the meat down with other people’s wine and beer. These werewolves were not all bad; they belonged to a brotherhood devoted to the good of the community. If you wanted their protection during the rest of the year, you looked the other way when they pinched a keg at Christmastime.
In Germany, the transformation occurred during the Twelve Days of Christmas, when the word Wolf was not to be uttered. The Lithuanians were of the opposite opinion: to talk of wolves at the Christmas dinner table would keep them away. And while Baltic werewolves liked to roam at night, German werewolves tended to be wolves by day and men by night, when they left their wolf-skin shirts hanging in the wardrobe.
If you are expecting to give birth during the Twelve Days of Christmas, you might ask your friends to throw you a werewolf-themed baby shower. Someday, that baby is going to be a teenager, and what could be more cool than to be able to say, “My parents thought I was going to be a werewolf.”
The Spectral Dog
The Norwegians continued to be swept up by the Oskorei into the mid-nineteenth century, but in England, the Wild Hunt broke ranks much earlier. It survived on the one hand as the ghostly coach that came barreling down the village street at midnight, pulled by a team of black and often headless horses, and on the other as a pack of spectral dogs. The coach no longer has any particular relevance to Yule, but the dogs have maintained a tenuous link with the Twelve Days of Christmas.
By the 1600s, the dogs had become identified as the hunting hounds of some rash lord who persisted in hunting on the Sabbath and, as if that were not bad enough, ordered the pack to be killed and buried with him when he died. This Sabbath huntsman has since served his time in Purgatory and is now enjoying his eternal rest, but because the dogs were sacrilegiously interred in hallowed ground, they are roaming still. In some parts of England, they were said to be the souls of unbaptized babies who, like the huntsman’s hounds, had no place either in the churchyard or in the afterlife. These Gabriel, Whisht, or Yeth Hounds were consistently described as coal-black with glowing eyes. Circling above the homes of the doomed, they served as a year-round death omen, but on New Year’s Eve, it was a white dog you did not want to see. A few towns in England required white dogs to be kept inside—along with any red-haired women—until the danger had passed.
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