The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (8 page)

none the wiser, and home they go.

Christmas morning on the farm is a happy one for a

change, for the new shepherd is found alive in his bed. He tells the farmer of the odd “dream” he has had and of the

part the enigmatic housekeeper played in it. Hild denies

everything . . . unless he can produce some evidence of his adventure? At this, the shepherd produces the little ring of elf-gold.

At the sight of it, Hild sighs and confides that hers is a rags-to-riches story. In Elfland, she had been no more than a lowly servant, but the Elf King fell in love with her nevertheless. His mother disapproved of the match. Though

an elf herself, Hild was placed under an
álög
, or elf-uttered curse—in this case, one uttered by her mother-in-law. Banished from the royal residence and from Elfland itself, Hild was compelled to ride a man to death each Christmas until

such time as she was found out and executed as a witch. That had been her mother-in-law’s plan, but this year’s man lived to tell the tale. Because he had had the courage to follow her along the Lower Road, he had freed her from the álög. (It

is not clear why his time in harness had not killed him, for Hild got just as much mileage out of him as she had from the others. It may be that not falling asleep was the key.) Having related all this, Queen Hild has no further need of the witch’s bridle to reach her home; she simply vanishes.

Our shepherd, we are told, eventual y married and took

up farming for himself. He did so well that folk credited his
56 Dead by Christmas Morning

prosperity to the beneficence of the Queen of the Elves.12

As for the farmer, with the curse now lifted, we can assume he had no more trouble getting good help.

Recipe: Icelandic Snowflake Breads

In Iceland, the beginning of the Christmas season means

it’s time to make
laufabraud
, Snowflake Breads. If you’re worried that the trolls might eat up all your hard work, you can hide your pastry snowflakes in a tin in the garage until Christmas Eve. The “breads” in this recipe are smaller than traditional examples—which are eight to nine inches in

diameter—so they can be fried in a smaller pan.

Ingredients:

1¾ cups flour

1 teaspoon baking powder

1 teaspoon sugar

1 Tablespoon unsalted butter

1 cup whole milk

Lard

Powdered sugar

In a large bowl, sift flour, baking powder and sugar together.

Set aside.

Heat milk and butter until butter is melted. Do not boil.

Add milk and butter to flour mixture a little at a time, stirring, then working with your hands until you have a stiff

dough. Add more flour if needed.

12. “Hild, Queen of the Elves,” along with accompanying notes, can be found on pages 43–52 of Jacqueline Simpson’s
Icelandic Folktales and Legends
. See same, page 180, for detailed instructions for making a witch’s bridle, if you must.

Dead by Christmas Morning 57

Icelandic Snowflake Breads Sketch

Knead dough on lightly floured surface until you can

form it into a smooth ball. Divide the ball into thirty-two equal parts and form each part into a smooth, round ball.

Cover balls with a damp cloth.

On a floured surface, roll each ball out with a rolling pin to about 1⁄8 inch thickness or about 5 inches in diameter.

Try to keep them nice and round. Stack rolled-out rounds

between sheets of waxed paper.

Heat about 1½ inches of lard in a frying pan. While

it’s heating, you can make your snowflakes. You can prick

patterns directly into the round with the point of a sharp
58 Dead by Christmas Morning

knife, or, making sure it is well-floured, fold the round into quarters and snip pattern in with scissors just as you would make a paper snowflake. You can cut little triangles out of the dough or cut triangular flaps and press them back.

When the lard is hot enough to make a droplet of water

hiss and spit, lay the first snowflake gently in it. Fry each side for about 30 seconds or until golden brown.

Drain snowflakes on paper towels and sprinkle with

powdered sugar when cool.

Home But Not Alone

In “Hild, Queen of the Elves,” the hero must travel to Elfland, but it is actually more common for the elves to invite themselves onto the farm. This folktale motif is known

as “The Christmas Visitors.” Most often it is a young girl who is left home but not quite alone. One Icelandic version comes to us from the pen of the rather schoolmarmish

Hólmfrídur Árnadóttir, whose childhood memoir,
When I

Was a Girl in Iceland
, was one of a series published by the Norwood Press in the early 1900’s. Hólmfrídur writes of a

“young maiden,” the new girl, left behind for unspecified

reasons on Christmas Eve. Not as industrious as Hild, she

lights the candles in the baðstofa and settles down to read the Bible. The fact that she has a Bible and knows how to

read it tells us that we have now entered the Protestant era in Iceland. The story could even be taking place in Hólm-frídur’s own day, by which time not much else had changed

since the Viking Age except for the introductions of the coffee mill and the spinning wheel.

Dead by Christmas Morning 59

The heroine is concentrating on the printed words

before her when who should come trooping into the room

but a “crowd” of people of all ages. There is nothing sinister about them; in fact, they’re in a festive mood and eager for the pious maid to join in their dancing, but she ignores them and continues reading. The dancers offer her “beautiful presents,” but the imperturbable girl does not even

look up from her book. The party goes on all night with-

out her giving in to temptation, though she must have had

to pull her feet up on the bed to let the swirling couples by.

No ballroom to begin with, the baðstofa would have been

crowded with chairs, spinning wheels and beds—the one at

Glambaer contained eleven—so there would not have been

room to swing a Yule Cat (see Chapter Eight) let alone to

host a dance.

Hólmfrídur gives no indication that the uninvited

guests are diminutive or even that they are elves, but they are certainly no ordinary neighbors, for at dawn they vanish, leaving the baðstofa just as it was. It would be nice to hear that they left a few gifts behind to pay for the use of the space, but apparently it is enough that our young

maiden has survived the night. She must have gotten some-

thing out of the bargain, for it was she who tacitly received the unearthly visitors every Christmas Eve thereafter.

In “The Sisters and the Elves,” the daughter of a devoutly syncretist household actually welcomes the merrymakers

with the greeting mentioned in Chapter Two: “Let them

come who wish to come, and let them go who wish to go,

and do no harm to me or mine.” This girl, too, keeps her-

self to herself and her nose in her Bible while the party is
60 Dead by Christmas Morning

going on, but because she praises God when the sun comes

up, the elves are forced to drop their precious gifts before they vanish. (It’s all right though: they get their treasures back again the following year when the less disciplined sister is left behind.)

The dark-minded reader will detect in the preceding

stories the distant echo of human sacrifice, a seasonal gift made to the powerful elves, fairies or land-spirits while the rest of the household looks away, and I will not say they are wrong. But the more important element to recognize is the

code of conduct outlined in the stories. Certainly these tales were told for entertainment—and how much more chilling

they would have been when told in the darkening baðstofa

or by the trembling light of an oil-fed flame at the kitchen table—but they were also teaching tools. There is another, rather daunting class of beings out there, the message runs, whose world often collides with our own. There is a good

chance that someday you will encounter them, either in

the borderlands or at one of those shaky times of year like Christmas and New Year’s Eves, and when you do, you had

better know how to handle them.

In our time, the most effective tool for banishing the

otherwordly is the light switch. One flick and “Poof!”: nothing there. Like our ancestors, we perceive what we expect to perceive in the night kitchen. It’s up to us to decide whether we heard the cat upsetting the dish rack or a cry for attention from the other side. For most of us, that “nothing

there” is perfectly acceptable, even desirable. But there are others of us who have always hoped to perceive something

more, despite the danger. The holiest night of the year is also one of the best times to send the rest of the family to
Dead by Christmas Morning 61

church, drink a strong cup of coffee, cut the power and wait with eyes open on the darkness.

Sitting Out 101

If your family happens to have other plans for you on

Christmas Eve, there’s still New Year’s Eve for hobnob-

bing with the elves. In Sweden, December 31 was celebrated by shooting at the sky and setting off the inauspiciously

named “tomte-flares,” a kind of firecracker called after the little gnome-like creature that inhabits the Swedish stable.

This was supposed to frighten off those ghosts, witches and trolls who had not already departed on Christmas morning, but I’m sure the racket caused many a tomten to stick his head in the straw as well.

In sparsely populated Iceland, however, the humans

were more careful. There, with the ocean on one hand and

the jagged volcanic wastes of the interior on the other, the early settlers quickly realized the importance of not offend-ing the elemental spirits who were their neighbors. Most of the time, they tried to keep well out of their way, but on December 31, a few hardy souls went looking for the Hidden Folk. In Iceland, New Year’s Eve is Moving Day for the elves, so that was the best time to catch them and ask them what the future might hold.

The practice of “Sitting Out,” as it was called, did not

originate in Iceland but in Norway where the ritual was

enacted atop an elf-mound or deep in the forest. In the old country, it was eventually classified as witchcraft and outlawed, but the sometimes cantankerous folk who emigrated

from Norway to Iceland and the Faeroe Islands tended to

be the kind of people who didn’t like the king telling them
62 Dead by Christmas Morning

whether or not they could talk to the elves. Sitting Out used to take place on Christmas Eve or Twelfth Night but was

transferred to New Year’s Eve when January 1 became the

official beginning of the year.

How to commune with the elves on New Year’s Eve? It’s

not really all that difficult. First, you need a gray cat. Place it in a harness or cat carrier—whichever is more comfortable—because you will be taking it outside. You kit should also include an axe, a sheepskin with gray fleece intact and a walrus hide. If you can’t get a walrus hide, the hide of an elderly ox, preferably freshly flayed, will also do. No fasting is required. I recommend a strong cup of coffee before you set off because you are going to have to stay awake all night Next, you must find a crossroads, all four branches

of which lead directly to churches. Lay the sheepskin on

the ground and yourself upon it. Cover yourself with the

hide so that no part of you is visible. (Norwegian wizards skipped the sheepskin and sat on the hide around which

they inscribed nine squares in the earth, but the Icelandic instructions make no mention of this.) You must now lie

perfectly still with the axe in your hands and gaze steadily at the edge of the blade, though how you’re supposed to

make it out in the darkness under the hide I’m not sure.

In any case, you must be all in place by midnight—you’ll

know when it is midnight by the ringing of the church

bells. Do not fall asleep; if you do, you might twitch, and you must not move any part of your body except your lips

until dawn. Still staring at the edge of the axe, you can now start reciting all the incantations you learned in preparation for this occasion. Did I forget to mention that this kind of Sitting Out is only for experienced wizards?

Dead by Christmas Morning 63

Not to worry; there is a layman’s version. When the elves

encounter someone lying or sitting at a crossroads, they are compelled to stop. Anxious to get on with their move, they will first try to entice the sitter to come along with them, even assuming the shapes of his mother, sisters or daughters. Failing that, they will offer him all sorts of wonderful gifts, and they always know just what the sitter will find most tempting. In earlier times, many a hungry Icelander