The Old Magic of Christmas

by Linda Raedisch

  For the dough:

  1 stick (8 Tablespoons) unsalted butter, softened

  ¾ cup sugar

  1 whole egg plus one egg yolk (reserve white for topping)

  Zest of one clementine or small orange

  Zest of one small lemon (use half for the dough, reserve other half for topping)

  ½ teaspoon vanilla extract

  ½ teaspoon anise extract

  2 cups flour

  ½ teaspoon baking powder

  Cream the butter and sugar together, add egg yolk, and stir well. Mix in zests and extracts. Add the baking powder to the flour and mix with the rest of the ingredients a little at a time. When the dough is smooth, form it into a ball, wrap it in plastic wrap, and refrigerate it for at least one hour.

  For the topping:

  1 egg white

  ¼ cup sugar

  Remaining lemon zest

  ½ cup ground almonds (or you can use sliced almonds and chop them very fine)

  Powdered sugar

  In a deep, medium-sized bowl, beat the egg white and sugar until stiff. Fold in lemon zest and almonds. Set aside.

  Roll out the dough to 1⁄8-inch thickness on a floured surface and cut into star shapes. Lay stars on a greased or parchment-lined cookie sheet and drop a dollop of topping in the center of each star. Bake at 350°F for 13 minutes or until star points and topping are golden brown.

  Dust cookies with powdered sugar while they are still warm.

  Befana stars

  [contents]

  36. For a thorough treatment of some distressingly corporeal vampires, see Paul Barber’s book Vampires, Burial, and Death, if you have the stomach for it.

  37. Such a stash was discovered in an old house in Wellington, England, in 1887, when demolition work revealed a hidden room inside the attic containing a comfy chair, a collection of six heather brooms, and a rope into which crow, rook, and white goose feathers had been woven. This “witch’s ladder,” as it was identified by the workmen, was apparently used to work black magic, not to get from one place to another. In his book History of Wellington, A. L. Humphreys suggests it was used to cross from rooftop to rooftop, but surely that was what the brooms were for? Taking their cue from early Wiccan writers such as Gerald Gardner, modern Witches use the witches’ ladder, also known as a “wishing rope” or sewel, to work white magic. The last occupant of the house in Wellington was an old woman. How she was supposed to have gotten in and out of the hidden room where she kept her broomsticks we are not told.

  38. “The Three Little Men in the Wood,” another of the Grimms’ fairy tales, was apparently never even in the running to become a seasonal opera, even though it opens in the snowbound forest. “The Three Little Men” features the almost universal “berries in winter” folktale motif as well as incorporating elements of Cinderella, Snow White, and Frau Holle, with the heroine taking on shades of White Lady toward the end of the tale. But, unlike “Hansel and Gretel,” “The Three Little Men” has neither a witch nor a Lebkuchen house, so I suppose there was really no contest.

  39. In “The Three Little Men,” the wicked stepmother sends the unnamed heroine out in a paper frock to gather strawberries in the snow.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

  The Lithuanian girl who wished to look on the face of her future husband could do so by walking three times round the chimneystack, naked, on Christmas Eve. This would be the central, freestanding structure that rose right up through the attic, so the girl could enact the ritual in private. The attic was really the only place to do it, for there could be no lights burning in the room if the spell were to work and her lover’s image come swimming up out of the darkness. It is not by chance that the magic was worked in the vicinity of the chimney, for the space inside those

  creosote-caked bricks or stones housed powerful spirits, as did the hearth below.

  First engineered by the Normans in the eleventh century, the chimney was much more than a means of conducting smoke out of the hall. If you wish to look with your own eyes on the passage to the land of the dead, you have only to find an ancient Welsh farmhouse, step inside, and stick your head inside the kitchen fireplace. Twist your head and look up into the black flue. Can you see a light at the end of the tunnel? For many a Welshman who had died or been laid out at home, this was the way to the afterlife. It was bad practice to carry a corpse out the same door used by the living, and the windows were too small to accommodate a coffin. There was, however, plenty of room to hoist one up and out the massive brick chimney. Elsewhere in the world, and no doubt within Wales itself, house builders hit upon the more convenient solution of a “coffin door,” which could be opened up easily when needed but blended in with the wood paneling when not. Still, in remote parts of Wales, the chimney remained the way to go.

  It’s possible that the practice of extracting the dead through the chimney was once more widespread, as in those distant days when, as Gerald Gardner would have it, the houses were built into the hillsides, and the living, too, might go to and fro through the smoke hole. And if the dead could escape up the chimney, might not a few wayward spirits come tumbling down? While the witch used the chimney mostly to depart and re-enter her own home, the Bodach, a Scottish version of the black-faced English bogeyman, liked to frequent other people’s chimneys. If he heard there were some particularly bad children up in the nursery, he might avail himself of the flues to get at them. There are few descriptions of the Bodach, since most of his victims were successfully scrobbled up the chimney and never heard from again, but he was supposed to resemble a little old man.

  In addition to the ghosts and bogeys sidling along the sooty passageways, there were ancestral spirits who slept all year among the hearth stones, then flared up brilliantly at Christmas to dispense their gifts and glowing blessings on the home. You will recall the story of the Gilbertsons’ boggart, who packed himself in the butter churn so he wouldn’t be left behind when the family decided to “flit.” Had the story taken place a thousand or more years earlier, the Gilbertsons would not have thought of moving at all; they would have recognized the so-called boggart as a member of the family, perhaps even its most powerful member.

  The Gilbertson boggart, like most boggarts these days, no longer had a proper name. Under pressure from a changing world, the family had long ago forgotten it. Throughout Europe, the names of the ancestors have faded away along with their cults,40 but there was one part of the house in which these tutelary ghosts lingered into the late nineteenth century and to which they still return at Yule. It is the hearth, the glowing throne of the household gods.

  On Christmas Eve we hang our stockings in front of the fireplace not because we don’t have clothes dryers or because St. Nicholas can’t fill them any other way—he’s a worker of wonders, after all—but because the fireplace remains a sacred space, a sooty temple, if you will. Even when the hearth amounts to nothing more than a closed range, it is still the heart of the home. A very, very long time ago, the remains of the ancestors themselves were interred underneath the stones surrounding the open hearth, their long bones forced into fetal position and dusted with red ochre. Even into the Christian era, infants who expired before baptism might be buried under the doorstep, beneath the easily loosened cobbles in front of the fireplace, or bricked up in a new chimney to serve as the home’s guardian forever after.

  The Kallikantzaros

  As evinced by the Scottish Bodach, not all chimney sprites were kind. Even the Bodach, who was a year-round menace, could not hold a candle to that most horrible of Christmas chimney-climbers, the southern Greek kallikantzaros or karkantzaros. The kallikantzaros was red-eyed and covered in black hair, its overlong tongue marking it as Čert’s and Krampus’s close kin. Instead of goat’s hooves, however, it had club-feet or just one foot. This did not stop it from getting where
it wanted to go. Traveling in packs, these creatures snuck in by way of the chimney to devour Christmas dinner. Not only did they gobble up the Christmas sweets and all the roast pork, of which they were especially fond, but they also felt a need to trash the place before clambering back up the chimney.

  Those with Christmas birthdays were most likely to be transformed into kallikantzaroi. They have been tentatively identified as Turkish werewolves marauding over the border, but the kallikantzaros also resembles an ancient Greek bogeyman with a soot-blackened face whose mission it was to snatch misbehaving children. Like the Romanian vampires, some of whom assumed their troubling shapes only on certain days of the year, many kallikantzaroi were ordinary mortals most of the time. Others were year-round monsters, though they showed themselves only at Christmas.

  The kallikantzaros’ taste for sweets suggests that it may be a vengeful child ghost like the Faroese niðagrisur, or “pig from below,” while its appetite for pork might be the mark of a child-devourer. On the maternal side, the kallikantzaros is probably descended from a class of child-eating demons called lamiae. The lamiae were black-skinned and often depicted with a bird’s or animal’s feet, sometimes one of each or even three. Lamia was a mortal woman who was driven mad with grief when her own children were murdered by the goddess Hera. The lamiae continued to feast on unbaptized babies into the early modern era. Pork in the form of a pink-skinned suckling pig may originally have been offered to the kallikantzaroi in place of a newborn baby.

  If you did not want the kallikantzaroi entering your house—and who would?—you could try hanging gifts of food, including pork chops, sausages, and candies, inside the chimney to pay them off. This had to be done not just on Christmas Eve but throughout the Twelve Days of Christmas. You could also try painting a black cross on the door. But the only surefire way of eradicating these demons was the application of frankincense and holy water. When the village priest arrived at the Orthodox Epiphany to bless the home with his smoking censer and basil-sprig aspergillum, the kallikantzaroi were finished. They beat a hasty retreat to their own dark haunts somewhere underground, not to return until next Christmas Eve.

  The Yule Log

  At Christmastime especially, the ancient ones are present within the confines of the hearth. Their cult survives in bits and pieces in the traditions associated with the Yule log, clog, or block. From the Balkans, to Germany, France, and England, libations were poured over the log, not just to set it merrily on fire, but to give the household gods and goddesses something good to drink and to invite them out to join the rest of the family at the feast.

  As important as the Yule log itself were the charred splinters, embers, and ashes left over at the close of the Twelve Days of Christmas, for these were the bits the ancestors had touched and transformed into magical gifts. Swept up as carefully as if they were gold, they were dispensed as needed throughout the year. In Germany, the fine ash of the Christbrand or Christklotz was strewn over the dormant fields on the nights between Christmas and Epiphany, while a charred hunk wedged in the crotch of a fruit tree ensured a good harvest. When tucked in the bed strings, it would protect the house from lightning, and when dropped down a well, it kept the water potable.

  An elderly friend of mine can recall Christmas Eves in Charente-Inférieure (now Charente-Maritime) in western France when her grandfather dropped handfuls of popping corn in the ashes before the massive, glowing tree trunk in the fireplace. There, the kernels were transformed into what he called dames blanches, “white ladies,” dancing in the heat of the fire. In Burgundy, they went one better, for there the smoldering log actually “gave birth” to little packets of sugar plums when the children weren’t looking.

  In most lands, the Yule log was not quite so fertile. Still, it was a treasure in itself, and on no account should any ashes be thrown away over the Christmas season. Ostensibly, this was so that one would not accidentally hit the Christ Child in the face, but originally, these ashes represented the family’s fortunes and had therefore to be kept close. This explains why to part with even a spark of the home fire at this sacred time of year was to court disaster. Suppose the ancestors were offended at the casual lending out of their essence and decided to drift out the door after it?

  Christmas is the season of good will, but if you were careless enough to let your own fire go out, you could not expect your neighbors to give you a light. The fizzling of the Yule flames was portentous on several levels. Before the tinderbox came along, it meant a cold bed and a cold board unless you could find some pre-Christmas embers still smoldering inside the village ash dump. It also meant there would be a death in the household within a year. Lastly and worst of all, it meant that the familial spirits had withdrawn their blessings and the very survival of the line was now in jeopardy. Even today, many families light a fat candle on Christmas Eve, placing it in the sink instead of blowing it out when they leave for Midnight Mass.41

  No matter if you have washed it with wine, cider, or grain alcohol, there was only one way to light a Yule log, and that was with a bit of the previous year’s log. The idea was that the Yule fire never really went out, and that no one, whether unbaptized baby or ancient granny, ever really died, for how could there be death where there was light, love, and warmth?

  The First-Footer

  When and if the revelers finally went to bed on each of the nights between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the Yule fire was carefully banked, then stirred to life again the next morning. The question of who was to wake the fire on the first morning of the new year was one requiring careful consideration. Oddly enough, he was not supposed to be a member of the household.

  In the British Isles, he was known as the first-footer, and it was best to engage him in advance, for the wrong sort of person would bring the wrong sort of luck. Throughout Europe, there was an all-but-universal consensus that the first-footer should not be a woman or, especially in Scotland, a redhead. If the first person to step over your threshold on New Year’s Day is Nicole Kidman, then you might as well pack your bags and start over somewhere else, and if she happens to enter with her left foot, then there’s really no help for you at all.

  One of the oldest obligations of the first-footer—who was preferably tall, dark, handsome, and had been born feet first—was to stir the embers of the fire. He would do this before even greeting the master of the house, having first entered without knocking. The Macedonian first-footer paid homage to the resident spirits by first offering a stone or green twig at the altar of the hearth. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the polaznik, or “attendant,” arrived first thing on Christmas Day to strike sparks from the Yule log. The more sparks the better, for each represented a sheep, chicken, or moment of happiness in the coming year.

  The Chimneysweep

  In England, the most desirable first-footer of all was the climbing boy, as underage chimneysweeps were known in the days when there was no such thing as underage, especially when it came to dangerous menial labor. When was the last time you had your chimney cleaned? In coal fire days, twice a year was the bare minimum; once in three months was more like it. Skip the chimneysweep, and you would eventually be woken up one night by a noise like trickling sand followed by a soft crash as, in the moonlight, a black creature materialized in the fireplace. Larger and larger it grew, climbing slowly, silently into the room. Could it be one of the dreaded Whisht Hounds that haunt the moors at Christmastime? No; it was a clod of accumulated creosote that had dislodged itself from the chimney’s brick lining and fallen on the grate to rise up in a black cloud, besmirching furniture, carpets, and curtains.

  Those of us who burn only candles and the occasional birch log in the fireplace would be unprepared for the amount of soot produced by a coal fire. By the early 1800s, coal had replaced wood as the preferred kitchen fuel and, except in peat-burning areas, it remained the fuel of choice for a long time afterward. The transition from wood to coal led to the shrinking of the fi
replace, which led in turn to the widespread replacement of the Yule log with the Yule candle. The popularity of coal also transformed the chimneysweep from a mere tradesman to a talisman. Because coal burns so much more messily than wood, do-it-yourself chimney cleaning became less of an option. Even the poorest families had to engage a professional chimneysweep now and then.

  The chimneysweep is a popular subject of the glass-blowers of Lausitz in eastern Germany, who, for the last hundred years, have been furnishing the world with feather-light glass Christmas ornaments. Clasping his ladder and brushes close to his body, my own stout little chimneysweep in his black top hat looks a lot like a snowman, but such are the limits of the medium of blown glass. As German lucky symbols go, the chimneysweep is right up there with the horseshoe, the Glückspilz, and the marzipan pig. To this day, the sight of a well-dressed chimneysweep with a sprig of holly stuck in his hatband will bring a smile to anyone’s face, especially in Germany and Denmark. The ladder and brushes he carried were the tools of his trade, but the top hat was the sweep’s own talisman: it was supposed to prevent him from tumbling off the roof while he plied his brushes from above.

  The washerwoman and the undertaker, whose cast-offs the sweeps had adopted for their uniforms, were just as indispensable to nineteenth-century urban life, but you don’t see either of them adorning people’s Christmas trees, nor would you invite them to step over your threshold on New Year’s Day. There is something simply magical about a well-dressed chimneysweep, even, or especially, when he is coated in soot.

  Since the Middle Ages, those Danish and German sweeps had been organized into guilds. The Jutish chimneysweep, who, as a rule, was a grown man and not a scrawny child, cut a dashing figure as he cycled through the streets, brushes strapped to his back, coat tails flying behind him. There were no gold buttons or frock coats for the English climbing boys, but by the mid-1800s, they had come to be regarded as such auspicious figures that you could assure yourself a whole year’s good luck just by having one come and stand in your kitchen on New Year’s Day. That was the one day of the year42 when, instead of risking his life among London’s narrow,