c.2024, Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, $22.00, 208 pages
Breaking and entering.
It happens every Christmas in your neighborhood somewhere. An old guy with a long white beard busts into a few random houses, steals milk and cookies and escapes before he can be apprehended. He’s not the only holiday mischief maker around, though. As in the new book, “ The Dead of Winter” by Sarah Clegg, when it comes to Christmastime characters, you’d better watch out.
On a chilly Christmas Eve morning not long ago, Sarah Clegg left the warmth of her parents’ home and crept along the English countryside in search of witches.
Legend says that the morning before Christmas was the time when witches portended who in the village would die in the following year, but Clegg didn’t see that and she didn’t spot her prey.
No problem. She says, throughout history, “Christmas teems with monsters.”
Witches aside, she begins her search in February at Carnival in Venice, which she admits is an odd time to think about Christmas but Carnival’s masks and decadence hark back to what Christmas was in ancient times.
By the fourth century, partly because of the rise of Christianity, it was “established” that Jesus was born on Dec. 25. This led to the “unruly mayhem” of 12 days of Christmas, and legends of murder, pranks, cross-dressing and mumming, in which “monstrous visitors” re-enact a play that “predates the 17th century.”
In Wales, on a the Julian Calendar Saturday before Twelfth Night, Clegg met grinning horse skulls called Mari Lwyds that snapped at passersby who screamed in glee. Krampus, a large horned creature, “the antithesis of Santa” arrived in Salzberg two weeks before Christmas. She visited Stonehenge, along with thousands of Solstice celebrants. And again, she looked for witches on December 13, on Lucy’s Night in Finland.
Christmas, she indicates, has always been full of merry and joy. But it seems that our forebears still demanded legions of “ghosts and monsters” for their midwinter enjoyment.
It gets awfully dark, awfully early these days and despite that Halloween is a few weeks past, if your Christmas or Hanukkah lights aren’t on, the night can still make you jumpy. That sound you heard outside was not eight tiny reindeer, and maybe you need this book.
So, here’s the pleasant surprise about “The Dead of Winter”: Taking readers around the world and through time, author Sarah Clegg doesn’t just focus on Old World beliefs, pagan fetes, and celebrations that are dark and maybe even a little unsettling. She brings along a good amount of light and levity to balance the unease, even reaching for laughs at the absurdity of grinning skulls and paper monsters. That tones the shivers down some, making this book fun, as well as a valuable study of holiday folklore.
You’re going to find Yuletide here, but definitely not the kind you’d send cards for. You’ll be scared, but you’ll also get a sense of twisted merriment and joy. If that’s what you crave around the tree this year, “The Dead of Winter” makes a nice winter break.
— The Bookworm Sez
