The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (17 page)

and one could never be sure what moved among the shad-

ows.

Medieval bestiaries were often elaborately illuminated.

As you read, you might wish to imagine the Black Dog

chasing the grizzled Yule Cat round an ornamental capi-

tal or the
Lair Bhan
cropping the grass in the margin. You might want to hold the book at arm’s length when you

arrive at the Whisht Hounds, and do not be surprised if the sparks thrown from the
Gloso
’s bristling back burn a few holes in the parchment.

The Yule Horse

Had Hansel and Gretel ventured into the forest surround-

ing the Ilsenstein at Christmastime instead of at Midsum-

mer as they do in 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,

A Christmas Beastiary 133

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 incuded 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 actu-

ally 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
134 A Christmas Beastiary

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 lit-

tle 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. Per-

haps 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 bot-

tle bottoms, and her mane consists of wisps of dark horse-

hair 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

A Christmas Beastiary 135

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. In West Glamor-gan, she was known as
Alderyn bec y llwyd
or “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
can-tered 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,

136 A Christmas Beastiary

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, bits and bobs. If you are not lucky enough to live where all manner of skulls lie bleach-ing 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 home-

land, the word
bukka
also came to describe a mischievous, horned spirit, as in the Irish
pooka
, the Baltic
puk
, Shake-speare’s Puck and, possibly, the English “spook.” This

A Christmas Beastiary 137

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, stamp-ing 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 was 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’ red and white faux fur, Finland’s
138 A Christmas Beastiary

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 Christ-

mas Eve. So as not to disappoint him, Norwegian chil-

dren 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 (Janu-

ary 6) in Norway and Denmark to trot along behind the

Star Boys as they paraded through the streets singing car-

ols 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
Nuttipukki
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 harm-

less, 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-A Christmas Beastiary 139

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 plow-

man and horses to eat. Sometimes, the Yule Boar was actu-

ally 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
140 A Christmas Beastiary

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.