The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (28 page)

Many of the songs were addressed to “thee, old apple tree,”

or simply, “old fellow,” for special attention was always

given to the oldest tree in the orchard.

The Apple Tree Man, like the tomte in his botrae,

resided in the oldest tree in the orchard, from which he was able to look after the farmer’s fortunes. Every orchard had one. Going sometimes by the uncomplimentary nickname

Lazy Lawrence, he discouraged thieves from making off

with the apples at harvest time. In this he might be assisted by an elderly White Lady. In
Folktales of England
, Ruth L.

Tongue contributes the Pitminster version of the following tale, in which a disinherited son prospers from a respectful encounter with the Apple Tree Man.

According to the Somerset law of “Borough Eng-

lish,” which is the opposite of primogeniture, the young-

est son inherited lock, stock and barrel. In this story, the youngest son rents his elder brother a patch of ground

with a crumbling cottage on it, a stand of apple trees, an ox and a donkey in their dotage. To add insult to injury,

the lordly younger brother announces that he’s going to

47. All wassail-carol quotes in this paragraph were gleaned from pages 46–47 of Ronald Hutton’s
The Stations of the Sun
. If you find yourself fascinated by wassailing customs, I recommend the chapter “Rituals of Purification and Blessing” in which those pages are contained, as well as El a Mary Leather’s classic tome,
The Folk-Lore of Herefordshire
.

228 A Christmas Witch's Herbal

drop by at midnight on Christmas Eve to force the don-

key to tell him where on the property a certain treasure is supposed to be buried. It was widely believed that at midnight on Christmas Eve, animals were granted the power of

speech, as they are in Beatrix Potter’s
The Tailor of Glouces-ter
, the mice, birds, bats and cats chattering away in nursery rhymes when the clock strikes twelve. The conversations of country livestock were more sinister, the horses, sheep and cows sometimes uttering prophecies of death for those who

dared to eavesdrop.

The elder brother goes out just before midnight on

Christmas Eve to offer his last mug of cider to the trees.

He’s already given a few extra tidbits to the ox and the donkey and decorated their stalls with holly, so we know he’s a decent fellow. As he pours the cider over the roots, the Apple Tree Man appears to him, his face wrinkled as that

last frostbitten apple which was always left on the bough for the fairies. He urges the elder brother to poke a spade under one of his twisted roots. Sure enough, the elder brother

unearths a chest full of gold coins which he quickly hides inside the house before the younger brother arrives. As the younger brother turns in at the gate, he hears the donkey

and the ox conversing about the rude and greedy fool who

has come too late for the treasure he seeks. The younger

brother returns home, outwitted by the Apple-Tree Man.

In “Tibb’s Cat and the Apple-Tree Man,” Mrs. Tongue

offers us another strange but charming tale about a curi-

ous little cat who resided at Tibb’s Farm. This “dairymaid”

as white tortoiseshell cats used to be called, wanted to know where the black cats went on all the “wisht nights witches
A Christmas Witch's Herbal 229

do meet” and was always trying to follow them. Having

failed to keep up on Candlemas and Halloween, on New

Year’s Eve she finally manages to reach the edge of the dark orchard into which the other cats have disappeared. But

before she can put so much as a paw among the trees, the

Apple Tree Man calls out to her in his creaking voice, urging her to turn around and go back home, for soon the men

will be coming to anoint his roots with cider and fire their guns to frighten the witches away. No, the orchard is no

place for a little cat on New Year’s Eve, he tells her. Best to wait and come back on St. Tibb’s Eve. So the little cat went home to wait for St. Tibb’s Eve, but it never came, and she soon forgot all about following the witches’ cats.

Here’s a final tip from the Apple Tree Man: a December

blossom, though pretty, means that someone in the house-

hold is going to die in January. And if there are blossoms while there are still ripe apples on the tree, pinch the blossoms off or, again, someone is sure to expire.

CONCLUSION

Eternity

“There they sat, those two happy ones, grown up,

and yet children—children in heart, while all around

them glowed bright summer—warm, glorious summer.”

~hans christian andersen, “the snow queen”

By Candlemas, a full forty days will have passed since

Christmas. Mary will have been churched48, so to speak,

the days will have grown longer and there will be little need for candles except from a spiritual point of view. On Candlemas Day, you can sit in a clean-swept parlor and watch

the snowdrops opening outside the window, but tonight

there is work to be done. “Down with the rosemary, and

48. Mary’s postpartum purification at the Temple was the blueprint for the medieval Christian “churching” of women forty days after they had given birth.

231

232 Conclusion

so/Down with the bays and mistletoe”49 and al the other

Christmas greens: down they must come if you have not

already stripped your mantles and banisters.

Nowadays, most of us are sparing with the greens, con-

tenting ourselves with a wreath on the door and one waifish spring of mistletoe hanging from the lintel. Swags and rop-ing cost money, but back in the good old days when Eng-

land was a maze of hedgerows, they were mostly free. At

Christmastime, English churchwardens went a little wild,

not so much with the rosemary and the bay—Mediterra-

nean natives that must be cultivated—but with mistletoe,

holly, ivy, broom and box. It was largely English monks

who ventured to the continent in the eighth and ninth cen-

turies to stop the Germanic tribesmen worshipping among

the trees or, worse yet, worshipping the trees themselves, so it’s a little ironic that at Christmas the primeval forest should have reappeared inside the English church.

Most churches and homes had their decorations down

by January 7, but it was permissible to leave them up until Candlemas. If you kept them up longer than that, you

risked an infestation of undesirable spirits. For each leaf—

some said needle or twig—of Christmas greenery linger-

ing in the house after that date there would be one goblin cavorting with the dust bunnies under the sofa or elsewhere in the house. But what to do with all those prickly things once they had been torn from their hooks and piled outside the door? The sheer volume of “brownery” was the

49. These are the opening lines of Robert Herrick’s 1670 poem,

“Ceremony upon Candlemas Eve,” which is a short version of his “Ceremonies for Candlemas Eve.”

Conclusion 233

perfect excuse for a bonfire. This “Burning of the Greens”

survives as a pyre built of Christmas trees in many Amer-

cian towns, especially in New England. In nineteenth-cen-

tury Scotland, where there was little to be had in the way of Christmas greens, people observed Candlemas with bonfires of the yellow-flowered gorse and broom they gathered on the moor.

Judging by the number of crunchy brown wreaths still

drooping on doors on Valentine’s Day, it seems that people just don’t worry about goblins anymore. I’d like to believe that this is because, on Candlemas, we’re too busy enjoying one last hurrah to think about undecorating, but for most

of us, this is not the case. In Mexico,
El Dia de la
Candelaria
is a day of fireworks and children’s parties, and a few European countries hold candlelit processions, but these are the exceptions. Here in the twenty-first century, our lack of

imagination has succeeded in banishing the ghosts, goblins, witches and elves better than any bonfire could. By February 2, we have long since forgotten about Christmas and

returned to the workaday world. With a full six weeks of

winter still to get through, it’s no wonder we get so excited about the prognostications of a certain groundhog.

Outside, beyond the snowdrops, the road salt dissolves

the skin of ice only to be washed to the shoulder by the

sweep of the spring rains. In July, the blacktop sends up

shivers of heat so that, just for an instant, it looks as if there are tinsel streamers blowing on the horizon. And there we

are, driving over the hot, treacley asphalt, petroleum fumes thick in the nose, entertaining memories of Christmas.

Were we really visited by all those spirits, or was it just a
234 Conclusion

dream? Ask the spirits themselves and they might tell us,

“Yes, it
was
all a dream,” for, really, the spirits don’t want to intrude: that is why they limit their visits to just a handful of days a year.

What would the children say if they could speak of such

things? Most children rush headlong into Christmas with-

out a care or backward glance. It’s the others you want to watch: the boy who goes stiff and unsmiling as he’s hoisted onto Santa’s lap, the girl who approaches her stuffed stocking on Christmas morning with a sense of trepidation even

though she can plainly see the doleful-eyed beanie baby

staring out over the cuff. Those children
know
. That stocking, which appears unremarkable to adult eyes, has obvi-

ously been stuffed through supernatural agency and must

therefore be handled with care. Once the toys have been

unloaded and unwrapped, they will belong to the child, but until then, they belong to the Otherworld. Can’t you see

how the patterned Christmas paper, last handled by elves,

still pulsates with magic? And what about the old man him-

self? How can he still be so spry, so
alive
, after two thousand years?

He can’t be, not properly.

It’s all right to accept presents from Santa Claus, these

children would tell you, just as it was and is all right to accept them from the Christmas Child, Barborka and

Epiphany Witch, for these are our rewards, our incentives, for staying on our own side of the veil. It is patently
not
all right to wait up for the gift-giver, to sneak a peak under that screen of hair or bushel of tulle or to follow them out the door when they go. It is forbidden to dance with them,
Conclusion 235

to eat at their table, and even, in some cases, to address them directly. The problem is not that the spirits
cannot
be engaged or looked upon in all their horror or glory, but that they
ought
not to be, not yet. If you have questions for them, if you would know more, you have only to wait a little—not an eternity; just the space of a lifetime.

ADDENDUM

A Calendar of

Christmas Spirits and Spel s

Mid-October to Mid-November: Álfablót

You don’t have to wait for those mall decorations to go up to start celebrating the elves. Now is the time to host an Elf Sacrifice, or feast for the Álfar, in the old Nordic tradition.

November 11: St. Martin’s Day

Don’t be surprised if St. Martin has come and turned your

bedside glass of water to wine in the night.

If the geese are ice-skating this morning, you’ll have a

mild winter. If they’re splashing, you’ll have a cold one. It’s all up to the Wild Rider who will be swirling through the

skies on his dappled horse from now on through the Twelve

Nights of Christmas.

Jack-o‘-lanterns are now out of season, but you might

consider carving an old-fashioned turnip lantern in token

of the bonfires that once burned on this night.

237

238 Addendum

November 24: St. Catherine’s Eve

If you’re not too busy baking cattern-cakes, you should try to get a jump on your spinning today. All wool and flax

must be spun by Twelfth Night if you are to have a good

visit from the
Spinnstubenfrau
.

November 29: St. Andrew’s Eve

All over northern Europe, this was the first of many nights on which
Bleigiessen
, the pouring of molten lead into cold water, might be practiced. Each hardened blob of lead was

scrutinized for hints as to what gifts one might receive in the coming year. Does it resemble a coffin or a car? If you don’t like what you see, you can try again on St. Barbara’s, Christmas, New Year’s or Epiphany Eves. If you can’t get your hands on Bleigiessen kit—they’re hard to come by

these days—, you can simply throw your shoes over your

shoulder and see how they land.

Romanian vampires are out in force tonight: rub all

window and door frames with garlic so they can’t get in

December 3: St. Barbara’s Eve

You must go out and cut your “Barbara branches” tonight

if they are to bloom in time for Christmas Eve. After you’ve put them in water, you can start looking out for the long-haired Barborky with their brooms, carpet-beaters and bas-

kets of sweets.

Addendum 239

December 5: St. Nicholas’ Eve

On this date in 1844, Hans Christian Andersen began writ-

ing
The Snow Queen
in his hotel room in Copenhagen.

Tomorrow, if St. Nicholas decides you have been good,

you can start eating
Spekulaas
, “mirrors,” which are cookies of pressed dough bearing images of windmills, castles and

seventeenth-century Dutch ladies. If he decides you have

been bad, he will allow his sidekick Black Peter to stuff you in his sack and carry you off to Spain.