The Old Magic of Christmas

by Linda Raedisch

  The Teutonic witch-goddess Berchta also sometimes traveled with a pack of hounds. Under the north German name of Holda or Holle, she led a broomstick-mounted flight of unchristened children through the night sky, especially on the twelve nights between Christmas and Epiphany. As in England, these children could also take the forms of dogs. When the goddess herself tired of her more or less human shape, she, too, might assume the appearance of a white dog.

  In Mecklenburg, Germany, on Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the townsfolk shut their doors against the passing of the spectral huntress Lady Gaude—another incarnation of Berchta—and her twenty-four daughters. Because these young women had loved hunting better than the prospect of salvation, they were turned into dogs and doomed to hunt until Judgment Day. Tired of having twenty-four maws to feed, their mother would shove one of them into each front door she found standing open. Once inside, the dog curled up at the fireplace and insinuated itself into the household.

  If you were foolish enough to try to kill your canine houseguest, it would turn into a stone. Throw the stone as far as you could, and it would just come trotting back again at nightfall. Though indestructible, the dog had to be treated well or all sorts of bad fortune would befall the household. If, when she returned the following Christmas, Lady Gaude found a happy, stern-waving hound with its coat nicely brushed, she would bestow her blessings upon the host family. But if you really wanted to get rid of your house-

  guest before the year was out, you had to do something really crazy in front of it, like brew ale in an eggshell. Like the Celtic fairy changeling, the dog would be startled into making some remark in human speech. Having blown her cover, the young huntress would then be compelled to leave.

  An easier way to prosper from an encounter with the Yuletide goddess was to help her get back on the road after her carriage broke down, as it always seemed to do during the Twelve Nights of Christmas. Once you had whittled and installed the replacement part, she would invite you to pick up either the wood shavings or the droppings her waiting dogs had left by the side of the road. In the morning, they would be turned into gold.

  Lady Gaude and her twenty-four daughters now belong to the realm of mostly forgotten folklore, but the lone black dog is “alive” and well in England, especially in Devon, former haunt of the Whisht Hounds. (The “Yeth,” or “heathen,” hounds stuck to North Devon.) Going by the names of Capelthwaite,31 Barguest, Black Shuck, or simply “the Black Dog,” his appearance does not always spell doom. Nowadays, the Black Dog might warn of impending disaster, comfort a child, or accompany a lone cyclist down a dark country lane.

  A Black Dog of Down St. Mary who surprised a choir boy on his way home from Christmas supper gave every appearance of knocking down the local schoolhouse, but despite the sounds of falling masonry, no damage was actually done. Mostly, the Black Dog simply appears, as it did one foggy Christmas Eve in Worcestershire in 1943. Larger than a Great Dane, with glimmering eyes, the Worcestershire Black Dog was simply trotting by without any clicking of claws on the pavement.32

  Many of us have met with the Black Dog or “Grim” most recently in Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban. While the Grim of the wizarding world is still very much a death omen, the Church Grim, which was often but not invariably a dog, was supposed to prevent witches from entering the churchyard. The Church Grim was not a volunteer; he was pressed into service when he was dispatched and buried under the gate, usually when the church’s foundations were laid. In Old Norse, a grim is a spectre, while in Old English, grim can also mean “fierce, savage.”33 The Scandinavian kirkegrim, who was perceived as a tiny man, is probably older than the English Church Grim, who is the result of a Danish vocabulary word introduced into an Anglo-Saxon population. Since the kirkegrim resembled a small human, it seems likely that the original foundation sacrifice was a child, not a dog.

  As for Sirius Black’s nickname of Padfoot, it is the name by which the Black Dog is known in Staffordshire, no doubt because of its silent paws. The Black Dog is hard to mistake for an ordinary dog. In addition to its size, which has been described as that of a calf or larger, it exits by unconventional means, either disappearing in a flash of light or simply fading from view.

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  31. It was most likely the Capelthwaite that inspired Sir Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles, though a headless black dog of Dartmoor has also been in the running.

  32. For these and more shaggy Black Dog stories, see Graham J. McEwan’s Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland.

  33. Grima could also mean “mask” in Old English. The Norse God Odin was nicknamed Grimr because he liked to travel incognito, but it is not certain if the Church Grim ever belonged to him.

  CHAPTER NINE

  Winter’s Bride

  If you grew up writing letters to Santa, you are probably used to a strict separation of the secular and spiritual celebrations of Christmas. Santa Claus belongs to the mailbox, the mall, the stockings, and the hearth. The Baby Jesus belongs in the church pageant and perhaps on a Christmas card or two. But a little digging into Santa’s background reveals that his nickname of “Kris Kringle” is actually a corruption of the German Christkindl, the diminutive form of Christkind, the Christ Child. In parts of Europe, it is the Christ Child himself who delivers the presents and even sets up the Christmas tree. More often that not, the part of the Christkind is played by a girl, who makes no effort to look like a boy but dresses in the veil and full white skirts of a bride. And the bride, as it happens, is one of the Yuletide goddess’s most enduring forms.

  The Christkind

  In the Czech Republic, the Christ Child is never seen; he arranges the gifts and sometimes also the tree behind closed doors, then rings a tiny bell to signal his departure. No matter how fast the children run after the sound of the bell, they won’t catch even a glimpse of his bare heels as he turns the corner. In Germany, however, a highly visible Christkind presides over Nuremberg’s Christmas Market in a pleated gold number that looks more like a cast-off from a Cecil B. DeMille set than anything a child might have worn in ancient Palestine.

  The Nürnberger Christkind, who also sports a golden crown and long yellow ringlets, is invariably played by a teenage girl. This instance of female-to-male cross-dressing is no recent development; the earliest illustrations of the Christkind on “his” gift-giving rounds show a girl with fair, flowing hair; a white gown; and a wreath of candles on her head. The Christ Child as ethereal gift-giver can be traced back to the early seventeenth century. Though “he” would find a permanent home in both Nuremberg and Counter-Reformation Bohemia, he was born in Protestant Germany as a reaction against the Catholic cult of St. Nicholas.

  The early Christkind’s crown might also be made of gold paper. In Alsace, she whitened her face with flour to help conceal her identity from the neighborhood children and to effect a greater contrast between herself and her companion, the black-faced Hans Trapp, as Knecht Ruprecht was known in those parts. She carried a bell in one hand to announce their arrival.

  In the very small town of Hallwil in the Seetal region of north-central Switzerland, the Wienechts-Chindli, or “Christmas Child,” and her colorful retinue continue to make the rounds on Christmas Eve. The Wienechts-Chindli has done the Alsatian Christkind one better: she appears completely veiled, the generous layers of tulle held in place by a golden crown with tinsel streamers. In the 1800s, when the custom was more widespread throughout the Seetal, this Christmas Child, like her invisible Czech counterpart, delivered the Christmas tree to the house. Now her visit is the occasion for lighting the candles on its branches.

  In her present form, the Christmas Child looks like a cross between a Western-style bride and an Afghan princess. She is usually about thirteen years old, as are her “maids,” who are always six in number. You can’t expect bridesmaids to wear the same thing year after year, and their costumes have under
gone subtle changes over time. In the 1800s, the maids, like the Christmas Child, dressed in white, but in the first half of the twentieth century, they switched to their Sunday best. After about 1950, they started to dress all alike, and they now appear in hooded cloaks of dusty rose. They carry lanterns and baskets of presents, singing carols at each house they visit. Their faces uncovered, they act as intermediaries between the mortal children of the household and the enigmatic Christmas Child, whose only greeting is a touch of her white-gloved hand. Unlike their early modern precursors—the ghostly, buzzing Salige Fräuleins, or “Blessed Young Ladies,” who consumed the essence of foods left out for them at night—the Christmas Child and her attendants accept no offerings in return.

  Barborka

  St. Barbara was a third-century Syrian Christian martyr whose feast was celebrated on December 4. In order to have absolute control over the young Barbara, her father, Dioscorus, kept her on the top floor of an ivory tower, which is why medieval artists often portrayed her hefting an ornate little replica of her prison. When Barbara converted to the Christian faith, her father hit the tower roof, pulled out his sword, and would have slain his daughter on the spot if God had not chosen that moment to split the tower in half with a bolt of lightning, allowing the girl to leap out and flee to the mountains.

  Betrayed by one of the shepherds among whom she took refuge, Barbara was subsequently imprisoned, tortured, and eventually beheaded on December 4 by none other than Dioscorus. Between Barbara’s capture and death, she had just enough time to work a minor horticultural miracle that is still celebrated today. When she was taken from the mountains, a twig from a cherry tree became caught in her skirts and remained there even when she was thrown in the dungeon. Barbara tended the twig in secret, as she had her Christian faith, causing it to burst into bloom in the darkness of her cell. This is the explanation given for the “Barbara branches” that young women cut on December 4 and force into bloom by Christmas Eve. These days, Germans use the blossoming Barbarazweigen mostly for decorative purposes.

  In Bohemia, cuttings of the sour or morello cherry were fortune-telling tools. The process varied: you could simply wait and see if your branch bloomed, and if it did, you would be married within a year and a day. If there were more than one nubile girl in the household, the one whose branch bloomed first would be the first to marry. Or, you could cut several twigs and label each with the name of a different boy. The boy whose branch bloomed first was the one whom you would marry. In Czech, such a branch is known as a Barborka (plural, Barborky), or “little Barbara.”

  At dusk on the eve of St. Barbara’s Day, a whole tribe of Barborky took to the streets. These were no twigs but actual girls. Beneath a chaplet of leaves or flowers, the Barborka was sometimes masked, sometimes veiled, but more often she simply let her long hair hang in her face. If she happened not to have an abundance of hair, or if it were a boy taking over the role, then “she” could make a wig of tow or the golden “wavy hair grass” (Avenella flexuosa) that grew in the meadows. Since St. Barbara died a virgin, the flowing hair may be a token of her refusal to marry the man of her father’s choosing, but there the Barborka’s resemblance to the martyr ends.

  The Barborka was unique to central Bohemia, and her costume varied from village to village. She might wear a black dress, shoes, and stockings in keeping with the more frightful aspect of what Leopold Kretzenbacher in his 1959 work, Santa Lucia und die Lutzelfrau, has termed the Mittwinter Frau, or “Midwinter Woman,” an unpleasant and unabashedly heathen figure who began putting in appearances throughout Europe at this time of year. While in black, the Barborka was more of a Midwinter Witch. Once a female leader of the Wild Hunt, this diminished goddess later went about on foot, her hair hanging down in tangles instead of streaming out behind her.

  The Midwinter Witch might also be arrayed in white, and when springtime came, her number was up. In Slavic lands, she was put to death under many names: Marzana, Morena, Morana. She could be made of straw, birch, or braided hemp. The Sorbs, a Slavic minority of eastern Germany, dressed theirs in a white shirt provided by the household in which a death had most recently occurred, while the bride who had most recently been married donated her veil to complete the scarecrow’s costume. After it had been ritually stoned, this “Winter’s Bride” was drowned in the nearest body of water. As her broken bits passed on downstream, they took Old Man Winter with them, allowing spring to come.

  But at Advent, the springtime is still a long way away. The Midwinter Witch is just finding her stride, and she will grow ever fiercer as she speeds toward her own feast day at Epiphany (January 6). Since the earliest days of the Church, efforts were made to subdue or at least to prettify the Midwinter Witch. On St. Barbara’s Eve she was re-christened in honor of the martyr. She was also placed in the vanguard of Svatý Mikuláš, the Czech version of the gift-giving St. Nicholas. After the Counter-Reformation, which lasted from 1542 until 1648, the Barborka began to resemble the Christ Child, who now delivered the presents on Christmas Eve. In her heyday around the end of the nineteenth century, the Barborka wore a blue or scarlet sash atop a crisp white lace-trimmed dress under which sprouted an abundance of petticoats. The sash was tied on her left side, corresponding to her “basket hand.” (In those villages where the tradition survives, white remains the color of choice for the dress, and the red sash has won out over the blue.) In Barborka’s right hand, she carried a broom or wicker carpet beater.

  The Barborky, who usually traveled in batches, did not ring the doorbell but struck the windows with their cleaning implements. Crossing the threshold, they announced that they had come all the way from the tiny village of Dražíč in South Bohemia to determine whether or not there were any good children in the house. If not, Barborka would swat the children with her broom or beater and let St. Nicholas know that there was no point in stopping when he passed through on the night of December 5. Good children received fruits and candies from the basket. Then, her message delivered, Barborka departed to bang on the windows of the next house.

  Lucia

  Yet another bridelike figure persists in the Swedish Lucia. Before the radical adjustments made to the calendar in the sixteenth century, the longest night of the year fell, or was supposed to fall, on December 13. English poet John Donne referred to St. Lucy’s Day as “Both the year’s and the day’s deep midnight.” Never a big deal in England, the feast of Santa Lucia is one of the most important celebrations of the year in Sweden, whose unique observance of the day has spread to Norway, Finland, Denmark, and the Swedish communities of North America, each of which elects its own “official” Lucia.

  By the 1700s, the Swedish Lucia had started taking fashion hints from the Lutheran Christkind. Since the early twentieth century, the standard Lucia costume has been a long white dress like a nightgown, a wide red ribbon tied at the waist, and a crown of at least six white tapers set in a wreath of lingonberry sprigs, though bay or box will do as long as the greens are fresh. (A wet handkerchief stretched over the top of the head will also help prevent the spread of flames without spoiling the effect.) A chandelier-like metal crown, not unlike the traditional Nordic bridal crown, is also acceptable, as are battery-powered candles if the Lucia is very small. Early Lucias tended to wear puffier gowns, in keeping with the fashions of the times, and the sash might be blue or draped across the chest. “Lucia 1908,” a painting by Carl Larsson, in which he depicts one of his daughters in what appears to be an actual nightgown, may have led to the simplified design.

  The third-century St. Lucy was another virginal Christian martyr whose story does not differ much from St. Barbara’s. Before her demise, St. Lucy was able to make herself useful by handing out gifts of bread to the poor, which is the reason given why Swedish household and office Lucias deliver coffee, pepper cookies, and saffron buns on the morning of December 13. Finland elected its first national Lucia in 1930, but the old Finnish stave calendar had already marked the date with the
image of a candle. Despite the fact that Iceland had two churches dedicated to St. Lucy before the rest of Scandinavia had any, there were no Icelandic Lucias until 1954, and even then they were celebrated only by those Icelanders who had some connection to Sweden. In Denmark, where Lussinatt used to be a night of augury, the tradition dates only to 1944, the year King Christian X was taken prisoner by the Nazis and the country began to experience its own deep midnight. Dressed in white, with crowns of tinsel or lighted candles, the Danish Lucias appear on the night of the twelfth rather than the morning of the thirteenth as in Sweden. On this erstwhile darkest night of the year, it is the Danish Lucias’ mission to bring a little sparkle to nursing homes, hospitals, and wherever else there is a desperate need to dispel winter’s gloom.

  There are plenty of supporting roles in a Swedish Lucia procession. Lucia’s maids carry candles while star boys wear tall, pointed hats adorned with foil stars and sing their own set of songs in addition to the obligatory “Santa Lucia.” There may even be a few Christmas elves bearing lanterns. Since 2008, boys have been fighting for the right to wear their schools’ Lucia crowns, and girls to act as star boys, both with limited success.34 In response to those who insist that Lucia must be a girl with flowing blond hair, I would point to the old-fashioned “Lussi-boys,” university students who strolled around singing carols to earn their Christmas pocket money, and to the now-vanished West Gotland practice of placing the candle crown on the farm’s best cow.