The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (26 page)

of mistletoe to celebrate the nuptials of Lord Lovel (or a nobleman of some other name) and his lady love, a play-ful slip of a girl. As the evening wears on, the bride suggests a game of hide-and-seek. But after her turn comes to hide, she cannot be found, not that night, or the morning after, or in the days and months that follow. She seems to have evap-orated, leaving her new husband to pine away, but first he orders his lost bride’s possessions stowed away in the attic so they will not remind him of his grief.

Years or decades after the bride’s unfathomable disap-

pearance, another family or branch of the family take pos-

session of the place. They are sorting through the dusty old sticks of furniture when they happen upon an old chest

inside which they find a skeleton in a wedding gown and

crumbling bridal wreath. We are to understand that the girl either banged her head with the lid or got locked inside and suffocated during the infamous game of hide-and-seek.

The Mistletoe Bride was made famous by Thomas

Haynes Bayly whose wildly popular ballad,
The Mistletoe
Bough
was published around 1830. But did Bayly make the whole thing up? Not according to the owners and caretak-ers of a number of old houses scattered from Yorkshire to

Cornwall, a few of them no more than collections of chim-

ney stumps and empty arches rising up from well-tended

lawns. At Brockdish Hall in Norfolk, there is supposed to

be a Jacobean bust of the bride, while Minster Lovell in

Oxfordshire has both the right family name and the story of a skeleton discovered in a secret space behind the chimney in 1708. But there were also Lovels at Skelton in Yorkshire.

Both Bramshill House and Marwell Old Hall in Hampshire

212 A Christmas Witch's Herbal

have since mislaid the famous chest, though Bramshill has

managed to hold on to a ghostly “bride” who appears now

and then in one of the bedrooms.

Samuel Rogers, writing about a decade before the pub-

lication of
The Mistletoe Bough
, would make the heroine a juniper bride, for “Ginevra,” the name he assigns to both the bride and his poem, means “juniper.” By his own

admission, it was Rogers’ personal stroke of creativity to set the familiar tale in Modena, Italy. As a piece of folklore, the Mistletoe Bride is unique to the English-speaking world;

there is no corresponding
Mistelbraut
motif in Germany, Bohemia or anywhere else on the continent.

Even Lucy, smallest of the Pevensie children in
The Lion,
the Witch and the Wardrobe
, knows you should never shut yourself in a wardrobe. The same goes for old dowry chests, although, since they can only be locked from the outside, it would be very tricky indeed to get stuck inside one. Silly as she might have been, the Mistletoe Bride has nevertheless

earned her place among the unquiet Christmas spirits of

the British Isles.

Mistletoe had long been accepted as a decoration in

home and hall, but the idea that the mistletoe was not per-mitted among the Christmas greens in English churches is

a common slander. The reason usually given is that mistle-

toe was sacred to the Pagan Druids, but it could just as easily be a distant Germanic memory of the beloved god Balder’s

death by mistletoe, or the fact that twiggy growths of mistletoe on the trunks of trees were known as “witches’ brooms.”

The early church fathers disapproved of any adorning of the pews and aisles with Christmas greens because it smacked of
A Christmas Witch's Herbal 213

the Pagan Kalends and Saturnalia. Still, English church wardens continued to haul such greens inside by the bushel, mistletoe included, even during those Puritanical spells when the celebration of Christmas itself was illegal.

Not that the mistletoe really needed the church’s

approval; it already had an established place in the home

where bushy balls of mistletoe hung from the ceiling at Yuletide. Some of these balls were decorated like Christmas trees, with corn dollies, fruits, paper roses, ribbons and candles. At first it was just to look at; widespread kissing under the mistletoe did not start until the 1700’s, and for a long time it went on only below stairs. The mistletoe has been used to

solicit kisses since time immemorial, but it used to involve chasing the girl down with sprig in hand, and then you could only kiss her as many times as there were berries. If it had been a bad year for mistletoe, the wooden hoops of the “kissing ball” could be covered in ivy or even the prickly gorse (
Ulex europaeus
) which could be gathered on the moor and might still have a few yellow flowers on it at Christmastime.

Still, a token sprig of mistletoe, however scrawny, must hang from the bottom of the ball.

In the mountain inns of the Rhaetian Alps, on the Aus-

trian side of the Swiss border, there used to lurk a sort of living kissing ball, though he was not at all pretty to look at.

On the night of December 31, St. Sylvester’s Day44, each inn 44. December 31 is St. Sylvester’s feast day, but in German-speaking countries it is known as
Silvesterabend
, “Sylvester’s Eve,” while New Year’s Day is simply,
Silvester
. It seems that the identity of this fourth century Roman pope was quickly subsumed by the festivities of the outgoing year when another pope, Innocent XII, fixed New Year’s Day as January 1.

214 A Christmas Witch's Herbal

installed its own
Silvester
in a dark corner of the tap room.

This Silvester did not represent the fourth-century pope for which he was named any more than the Pelznichol could be

said to portray the Bishop of Myra; he was the incarnation of the old year, or its last gasp, and he was eager for a kiss before he went on his way. Wearing the mask of an old man

with a long white beard and a mistletoe wreath on his head, he must have looked like a withered Father Christmas as

he sat there in the gloom beyond the hearth light. There he waited for someone—anyone—to forget him or herself and

cross beneath the wreath of pine boughs hanging from the

ceiling. As soon as the hapless drinker did so, Silvester leapt up and planted a rough kiss on his or her lips. When the

clock struck twelve, the fun was over, for at that moment

Silvester was driven out into the snow.

The Rhaetians who gave their name to this stretch of

the Alps were an ancient Alpine people who may have been

Etruscan, Celtic or simply Rhaetian. Their language merged with Latin to create Rhaeto-Romansch, which is still spoken in pockets of Switzerland. The Rhaetians may have

been the earliest runemasters, for they left behind plenty of very runic-looking inscriptions on wood, bone and stone.

We know that the runes eventually made it north into the

hands of the Germanic peoples, so it is not impossible that those Celts who would later be known as Gauls and Britons might have taken something of this ancient New Year’s

ritual with them when they left their old central European homeland. Could it have been that hint of lasciviousness

which characterized the Alpine Silvester that lingered and
A Christmas Witch's Herbal 215

later gave the English the idea that mistletoe was not, or ought not to be, allowed in church?

Because regional attitudes vary greatly, a few churches

probably did deny entry to our little green and white friend, but most of them welcomed any plant that was still green in December, and not just in the aisles. Records indicate that in York, the mistletoe, like the ghostly bride who bears its name, made it all the way to the altar.

Juniper

(
Juniperus communis
)

In
Hänsel and Gretel
, the opera, the Nibbling Witch’s wand is a juniper branch which she uses to “freeze” and “unfreeze”

her household servants. This is not the first time a cleaning implement has been transformed into a magical instru-

ment in the hands of a witch. While brooms were usually

used to sweep the floor, juniper was burned to purify the

general atmosphere of the home, especially at Christmas-

time. Like the blackthorn on St. Lucy’s Eve, dried juniper cuttings were dropped over hot coals in a frying pan and

walked through house and stables on the eves of Christmas

and Epiphany. The fragrant white smoke purged the prem-

ises of all manner of evils, witches included.

Juniper smoke may have given the Twelve Nights of

Christmas their German name of
Rauhnächte
,
Rauh
coming from
Rauch
or “smoke.” Then again,
rauh
could mean

“rough, hairy,” referring to the werewolves and other furry characters prowling around at this time of year. (Werewolves, it must be noted, were believed to fear juniper

216 A Christmas Witch's Herbal

trees.)
Rauh
can also mean “raw” as in “cold,” as in
Rauhreif
or “hoarfrost,” which is both cold and rough.

Juniper has an interesting relationship with the rowan

which was long used to discourage witches because they

could not stomach the red berries. You might say that juniper and rowan get on like a house on fire, because that was exactly what would happen if you brought them inside

together: your house would burn down. A sliver of juniper

incorporated into a rowan wood boat, however, would pre-

vent the boat from sinking.

In parts of Switzerland, boys still carry “brooms,” poles

topped with bunches of juniper, through the town on New

Year’s Eve, while in the Alps, Martinmas used to be the

occasion to distribute
gerten
, birch rods topped with clusters of oak leaves and juniper sprigs. The gerten were kept through the winter then used to drive the cattle to the

spring pastures. The more juniper berries that clung to the gerte, the more calves would be born in the spring.

Juniper thrives on the Lüneberg Heath in northern Ger-

many, a former gathering place for witches. There, herds of
Heidschnucke
, “heath nibblers,” an ancient breed of sheep, nibble everything but the sprawling juniper shrubs which

are much too prickly to be tasty. Another sort of spirit, gin, takes its name from the juniper berries (French
genièvre
) with which it is flavored. In the old days, a dash of gin on a silk handkerchief was the most elegant way to clean the surface of a mirror, so be sure to keep a bottle on hand if you plan to engage in any mirror magic on Christmas or New

Year’s Eve. (See Addendum.)

A Christmas Witch's Herbal 217

Holly

(
Ilex aquifolium
)

One of the more obscure names for holly is “bat’s wing.”

I’m sure my fellow bat-lovers will share my confusion as

to why such a descriptive tag has not taken off. The hol-

ly’s genus name,
Ilex
, was the Latin name for the holm oak (
Quercus ilex
), a Mediterranean oak whose dark green leaves do not turn brown even in winter. There are many

mysteries concerning the holly, not the least of which is

why so many people consider it to be so much holier than

ivy. According to Christian legend, both the Cross and

the Crown of Thorns were made of holly. For its crimes,

God transformed the holly, which up till then had been a

tall and stately palm, into a thorny shrub with berries red as blood. Even today, its German name is
Stechpalme
or

“prickly palm.”

But holly as we know it was already among the greens

with which the Romans dressed their homes for the Pagan

feast of Saturnalia. When you look at its history, the holly ought to top the list of Disreputable Christmas Trees (and Shrubs), but except for a few vain attempts by early popes and Puritans, holly has never really fallen out of favor with the Church. It remains the shining Christmas star of the

British Isles in whose relatively mild climate this not-quite-so-cold-hardy evergreen thrives. From the early Middle

Ages on,
Hollen
was hauled into both churches and homes by the armful each December. It was best not to bring holly into the house until Christmas Eve, while holly gathered on Christmas Day would keep witches away. Domestic holly

decorations had to be taken down and thrown away imme-

218 A Christmas Witch's Herbal

diately after Twelfth Night, but church holly would attract good fortune all year.

Do not be mistaken: the holly is more than a good-

time Christmas dandy. In the old days, poor householders

in Wales would tie a generously leafy bunch of holly twigs in the middle of a long rope, the end of which the master

of the house, having climbed up on the roof, would drop

down the chimney. This was caught by the mistress who

took turns with him pulling the rope up and down until

their makeshift chimney brush had scrubbed away the

worst of the soot and sent it billowing out into the kitchen in an apocalyptic black cloud.45

A hobgoblin known as Charlie who haunted the kitchen

of an inn on the Blackdowns of Somerset was partial to

holly. Charlie liked to perch on the Clavey, a holly wood

beam which hung above the fireplace and whose sole pur-

pose was to give little Charlie a place to sit and warm his toes. Charlie was both a helpmeet and a mischievous imp.

If he took against an expected guest, he would unset the

table, putting all the cups and cutlery away before the guest arrived.

One of the most famous expected guests in English lit-

erature, the Ghost of Christmas Past, greets Scrooge with “a branch of fresh green holly in its hand,” while the Ghost of Christmas Present wears a “holly wreath set here and there with shining icicles,” reflecting, perhaps, the ancient Greek 45. See page 327 of John Seymour’s
The Forgotten Arts and Crafts
for an enjoyable account of how Mr. Seymour and a neighbor attempted to unblock a Welsh farmhouse chimney on Old New