The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (25 page)

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 lad-

der 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 sup-Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 203

posed 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-1800’s, 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 year43

when, instead of risking his life among London’s narrow, carbon-coated flues, he could wander the neighborhoods with

43. The English climbing boy did have one other day off and that was May Day when he was allowed to lay his brushes aside and was given plenty to eat. American climbing boys enjoyed no such day and, unlike their English counterparts who were practical y slaves, the American chimneysweeps often actual y were slaves. Even in northern cities like New York, small boys were rented out from Southern slave owners and brought north to do the job. The use of underage chimneysweeps went on a lot longer in the United States than in England where the practice effectively came to an end in 1875.

204 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

his fellows, accepting treats in exchange for the blessings he bestowed.

Obviously, the chimneysweep’s nineteenth- and early

twentieth-century patrons did not consciously regard him

as an intermediary between the household spirits and the

living members of the family. By that time, a fireplace was just a fireplace and no longer a temple. But people did continue to look upon the chimneysweep as something more

than met the eye. Was it his blackened countenance that

placed him among the other dark yet indispensable Christ-

mas spirits?

The age of coal should have fostered a dramatic rise in

chimney revenants or unquiet ghosts, for, all too often, the climbing boy became wedged inside the flue and choked to

death on the fine soot his movements dislodged. Then the

bricklayer, who was
not
a lucky talisman, had to be called to come and dislodge the corpse. The reason why the ghostly

climbing boy seems never to have made it into oral tradi-

tion is probably because these children, most of whom were sold into their so-called apprenticeships, had no one to

answer for them. Few homeowners would want it known

that a child had died in their wal s. In fact, the master of a wealthy house might not even know of it until he was presented with the bil for the dismantling and restoration of the brickwork. The master sweep would soon replace the

dead boy with another orphan or penniless waif and all

would be forgotten. Since many climbing boys eventual y

succumbed to asthma, tuberculosis and cancer of the scro-

tum, brought on by prolonged exposure to soot, there was

no one left to tell the tale.

Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 205

Way back in the wood-burning days of the late sixteenth

century, we find every Englishman’s favorite hobgoblin,

Robin Goodfellow, forsaking his usual sylvan haunts to

roam the streets of London disguised as a chimneysweep.

“Ho! Ho! Hoh!” he cries as he runs amuck with his brushes

in
The Mad Pranks and Merry Jests of Robin Goodfel ow
.

Despite the grim reality of his situation, it seems the stage was already set for the climbing boy to take on a little of the power of Faerie.

The Fairy Queen’s Men

The chimneysweep’s soot-streaked face was the natural

consequence of his profession, but what of those roving

characters who deliberately blackened their faces? The bellsnickle and other wild “Nicholases” liked to blacken their faces, as do Knecht Ruprecht and the Moorish Zvarte Piet

to this day. We have not yet mentioned the most famous

of the Three Kings, Balthasar, who is traditionally por-

trayed with the dark complexion of a sub-Saharan African,

no matter that the Magi were Persians. But, with the exception of Zvarte Piet who is made to wriggle up and down the chimney in the bishop’s stead, none of these characters have much to do with the chimney or the hearth. Or do they?

The so-called Screaming Skull of Bettiscombe Manor

in Dorset may provide a missing link of sorts. This family heirloom, which had at all times to be kept in the vicinity of the house’s main chimney, was supposed for a long time

to have belonged to a West Indian man, a servant of one

of the house’s early masters. As long as it was left in place, the skull would protect the house from harm. It was later

206 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

proven to have been a woman’s, so who knows who its orig-

inal owner was or how it came to be resting in the chim-

ney nook. The important thing is that the tutelary spirit

attached to the skull was believed to have been dark of face.

The association between the spirits imminent in the

chimney at Christmastime (or throughout the year as at

Bettiscombe manor) and the appearance of dark skin,

whether genuine or artful, has been going on for lon-

ger than anyone can remember. The current house at Bet-

tiscombe Manor was built in 1694, but the pan-European

first-footer, who was preferably both dark-haired and dark-complexioned, recedes into the mists of the pre-Christian

past.

Could anyone blame us if we were to go looking among

the morris dancers (read “Moorish” dancers) for clues to

this mysterious association? The folklorists of the early

1900’s found in England’s morris dancers a tantalizing pantheon of prehistoric fertility gods. The so-called “Welsh

Border Morris” appears to provide exactly what we are

looking for: black-faced dancers wielding sticks in an early winter ritual as old as the land itself. But further probing reveals that the morris dance began as a courtly Christmas entertainment and can only be traced back as far as 1458.

So who
are
these strange characters supposed to represent? Dark Elves? The ancient dead, grown black from lying so long in the cold ground? It is tempting to surmise that the office of the first-footer was originally executed by a priest who blackened his face and hair in order to imper-sonate either one of the ancestors or some long-forgot-

ten deity of winter. More romantic still is the notion that
Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 207

he may have belonged to an aboriginal European people,

this time raven-haired instead of red, that fled to the hills at the rippling advance of the Indo-Europeans. In this sce-nario, an uneasy truce is reached in which the votaries of the native fertility goddess are invited down at the winter solstice to bestow the blessings of the old goddess upon the new stewards of the land.

Of course, there may be a more prosaic explanation

for the dark-faced Christmas spirit. We have already wit-

nessed the use of masks to disguise and transform. Ever

since the Roman Saturnalia went head to head with Christ-

mas, the Church had been speaking out against the wearing

of masks. To dress as a devil was devilish in itself, except, of course, if you were trying to frighten the children into learning their catechism. Now and again throughout the

Middle Ages and Early Modern period, the carving and

wearing of
Larven
and the like were outlawed, for even though they had found legitimate employment with a saint,

Čert, Krampus and the Buttnmandln could still get out of

hand. At such times, those who could not or would not

resist the social and spiritual forces that compelled them to take on otherworldly personae could get around the law by

simply blacking their faces.

Thus, a soot-blackened face came to signal both an

alliance with the ancestral spirits, elves and fairies and to mark the disguised person as something of a rebel. In June of 1451, a party of one hundred men went hunting in the

Duke of Buckinhgham’s Forest. They helped themselves to

over a hundred deer, but they were not professional poach-

ers; they were ordinary men dissatisfied with their liv-

208 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

ing conditions. Dressed in makeshift war gear, their faces obscured by fake beards and a thin coating of charcoal, they identified themselves as the servants not of King Henry nor, certainly, of the Duke of Buckingham, but of the “queen of the fairies.”

Why black? Why not woad or red ochre as in the old

days? For one thing, soot was more readily available—all

you had to do was reach into the fireplace—and it obscured the features more effectively than flour. There was also a belief, handed down from antiquity, that black made the

wearer invisible to the spirits of the dead. (That is why

black is the color of mourning in the Western world: orig-

inally it was a means of protection, not an expression of

sorrow.) We may never have a completely satisfying expla-

nation for the dark-faced Christmas spirit, but it seems

that, by blackening his face, the mummer, guiser, Knecht

Ruprecht or servant of the Fairy Queen could put one foot

in the unknown and keep the other safely planted in the

here and now.

A Christmas Witch’s Herbal

Generally, the medieval herbal, or “herball,” was much

plainer than the medieval bestiary. The hand-drawn or

woodblock illustration of each plant had to resemble the

real thing if the book was to be of any use, while the entries had to convey the unique properties of each species and

how it might be employed in the stillroom, kitchen or hall.

That is not to say that there was no room at all for fancy or folkloric musings. On the contrary, many flowers, trees and roots were valued as much for their power to banish ghosts, reveal hidden treasures and keep witches away as they were for their ability to relieve cough or indigestion.

The plant world’s link to the supernatural has certainly

been weakened in recent centuries, but it has not been broken. To this day, it is hard to talk about garlic without mentioning vampires, or to speak of mistletoe without bringing up the Druids in the same breath. This chapter is the sort of herbal which I imagine a well-traveled Frau Holle (whose

name may actually be related to the root word for “holly”)
209

210 A Christmas Witch's Herbal

might put together, then leave open on the bench beside

her for a little light Christmas reading while she sits spinning by the hearth.

There are no instructions here for making tinctures or

brewing herbal teas. Both the apple and the lingonberry are edible, of course, as are the berries of the juniper and the hips and petals of the white rose. All the rest are highly poisonous and, like the others, are presented here for the sake of their relationship to Christmas and for the strange tales attached to them.

Mistletoe

(Viscum album)

Why do brides make such wonderful ghosts? Is it because

they already have the right clothes on? This might hold

true for those who met their doom during or since the Vic-

torian era when the white wedding dress came into fash-

ion, but before that, European brides were as likely to wear red, silver or even black. It is the bride’s precarious position in life, one foot over the threshold of conjugal bliss, the other still planted in childhood, which puts her at risk. If the earth should break open between her slippered feet, she will teeter and tumble into the Otherworld, never to return except as a ghost. Set her wedding during the supernaturally unstable Christmas season and the opportunity for

thrills and chills increases. Of course, most weddings go off with scarcely a hitch. In the case of the Mistletoe Bride, the tragedy struck during the reception.

The occasion is a Christmas wedding, the scene the great

hall of a castle or manor house hung with holly and bunches
A Christmas Witch's Herbal 211