The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (18 page)

That takes care of the pig on top of the table; in Swe-

den, 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 table cloth 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’ 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.

A Christmas Beastiary 141

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
Jolakottur
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 hay-making, 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

142 A Christmas Beastiary

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
Jolakottur
.

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 par-

ents 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 watch-

phrase 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.

A Christmas Beastiary 143

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 were-

wolves started running amok on St. Lucy’s Eve (Decem-

ber 12), while the shaggy black
kallikantzaroi
, 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 sur-

prise 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 opin-

ion: 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
144 A Christmas Beastiary

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 1600’s, the dogs had become identified as the

hunting hounds of some rash lord who persisted in hunt-

ing 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.

A Christmas Beastiary 145

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 Epiph-

any. 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

Eves, 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 salva-

tion, 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 houseguest 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
146 A Christmas Beastiary

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 rode 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

Capelthwaite32, 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 actu-

al y done,. Mostly, the Black Dog simply appears, as it did one foggy Christmas Eve in Worcestershire in 1943. Larger

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

A Christmas Beastiary 147

than a Great Dane, with glimmering eyes, the Worcester-

shire Black Dog was simply trotting by without any clicking of claws on the pavement.33

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 bur-

ied under the gate, usual y 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.”34 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 unconven-tional means, either disappearing in a flash of light or simply fading from view.

33. For these and more shaggy Black Dog stories, see Graham J.

McEwan’s
Mystery Animals of Britain and Ireland.

34.
Grima
could also mean “mask” in Old English. The Norse God Odin was nicknamed
Grimr because he liked to travel incognito, but is not certain if the Church Grim ever belonged to him.

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 mail-

box, 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