The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (24 page)

date a coffin. There was, however, plenty of room to hoist one up and out the massive brick chimney. Elsewhere in

the world, and no doubt within Wales itself, house builders hit upon the more convenient solution of a “coffin door,”

which could be opened up easily when needed but blended

in with the wood paneling when not. Still, in remote parts of Wales, the chimney remained the way to go.

It’s possible that the practice of extracting the dead

through the chimney was once more widespread, as in

those distant days when, as Gerald Gardner would have it,

the houses were built into the hillsides and the living, too, might go to and fro through the smoke hole. And if the

dead could escape
up
the chimney, might not a few way-ward spirits come tumbling down? While the witch used

the chimney mostly to depart and re-enter her own home,

the Bodach, a Scottish version of the black-faced English

bogeyman, liked to frequent other people’s chimneys. If he heard there were some particularly bad children up in the

nursery, he might avail himself of the flues to get at them.

There are few descriptions of the Bodach, since most of his victims were successfully scrobbled up the chimney and

never heard from again, but he was supposed to resemble

a little old man.

In addition to the ghosts and bogeys sidling along the

sooty passageways, there were ancestral spirits who slept all
Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 195

year among the hearth stones, then flared up brilliantly at Christmas to dispense their gifts and glowing blessings on the home. You will recall the story of the Gilbertson’s boggart who packed himself in the butter churn so he wouldn’t be left behind when the family decided to “flit.” Had the

story taken place a thousand or more years earlier, the Gilbertsons would not have thought of moving at all; they

would have recognized the so-called boggart as a member

of the family, perhaps even its most powerful member.

The Gilbertson boggart, like most boggarts these

days, no longer had a proper name. Under pressure from

a changing world, the family had long ago forgotten it.

Throughout Europe, the names of the ancestors have faded

away along with their cults41, but there was one part of the house in which these tutelary ghosts lingered into the late nineteenth century and to which they still return at Yule.

It is the hearth, the glowing throne of the household gods.

On Christmas Eve we hang our stockings in front of

the fireplace not because we don’t have clothes dryers or

because St. Nicholas can’t fill them any other way—he’s

a worker of wonders, after all—but because the fireplace

remains a sacred space, a sooty temple, if you will. Even

when the hearth amounts to nothing more than a closed

41. They did not disappear all at once; in Lithuania, where such rituals went on a lot longer than elsewhere on the continent, the hearth spirit Gabija was addressed respectful y each morning when the fire was stoked and again at bedtime when the embers were banked. When a bride departed for her new home, she

carried with her the fire from her mother’s hearth. In Ireland, St.

Brigid (formerly the goddess Brigid) was invoked each evening when the central hearth fire was covered over with ashes.

196 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

range, it is still the heart of the home. A very, very long time ago, the remains of the ancestors themselves were interred underneath the stones surrounding the open hearth,

their long bones forced into fetal position and dusted

with red ochre. Even into the Christian era, infants who

expired before baptism might be buried under the door-

step, beneath the easily-loosened cobbles in front of the

fireplace, or bricked up in a new chimney to serve as the

home’s guardian forever after.

The Kallinkantzaros

As evinced by the Scottish Bodach, not all chimney sprites were kind. Even the Bodach, who was a year-round menace,

could not hold a candle to that most horrible of Christmas chimney-climbers, the southern Greek
kallinkantzaros
or
karkantzaros
. The kallikantzaros was red-eyed and covered in black hair, its overlong tongue marking it as Čert’s and Krampus’ close kin. Instead of goat’s hooves, however, it

had club-feet or just one foot. This did not stop it from getting where it wanted to go. Traveling in packs, these creatures snuck in by way of the chimney to devour Christmas

dinner. Not only did they gobble up the Christmas sweets

and all the roast pork, of which they were especially fond, they also felt a need to trash the place before clambering back up the chimney.

Those with Christmas birthdays were most likely to be

transformed into kallikantzaroi. They have been tentatively identified as Turkish werewolves marauding over the border, but the kallikantzaros also resembles an ancient Greek bogeyman with a soot-blackened face whose mission it was

Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 197

to snatch misbehaving children. Like the Romanian vam-

pires, some of whom assumed their troubling shapes only on certain days of the year, many kallikantzaroi were ordinary mortals most of the time. Others were year-round monsters, though they showed themselves only at Christmas.

The kallikantzaros’ taste for sweets suggests that it may

be a vengeful child ghost like the Faroese niðagrisur, or “pig from below,” while its appetite for pork might be the mark of a child-devourer. On the maternal side, the kallikantzaros is probably descended from a class of child-eating demons

called
lamiae
. The lamiae were black-skinned and often depicted with a bird’s or animal’s feet, sometimes one of each or even three. Lamia was a mortal woman who was driven

mad with grief when her own children were murdered by the

goddess Hera. The lamiae continued to feast on unbaptized

babies into the early modern era. Pork in the form of a pink-skinned suckling pig may originally have been offered to the kallikantzaroi in place of a newborn baby.

If you did not want the kallikantzaroi entering your

house—and who would?—you could try hanging gifts of

food, including pork chops, sausages and candies, inside the chimney to pay them off. This had to be done not just on

Christmas Eve but throughout the Twelve Days of Christ-

mas. You could also try painting a black cross on the door.

But the only surefire way of eradicating these demons was

the application of frankincense and holy water. When the

village priest arrived at the Orthodox Epiphany to bless the home with his smoking censer and basil sprig aspergillum,

the kallikantzaroi were finished. They beat a hasty retreat
198 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

to their own dark haunts somewhere underground, not to

return until next Christmas Eve.

The Yule Log

At Christmastime especially, the ancient ones are present

within the confines of the hearth. Their cult survives in bits and pieces in the traditions associated with the Yule Log, Clog or Block. From the Balkans, to Germany, France and

England, libations were poured over the log, not just to set it merrily on fire, but to give the household gods and goddesses something good to drink and to invite them out to

join the rest of the family at the feast.

As important as the Yule Log itself were the charred

splinters, embers and ashes left over at the close of the

Twelve Days of Christmas, for these were the bits the ancestors had touched and transformed into magical gifts. Swept up as carefully as if they were made of gold, they were dispensed as needed throughout the year. In Germany, the

fine ash of the
Christbrand
or
Christklotz
was strewn over the dormant fields on the nights between Christmas and

Epiphany, while a charred hunk wedged in the crotch of a

fruit tree ensured a good harvest. When tucked in the bed

strings, it would protect the house from lightning, and

when dropped down a well it kept the water potable.

An elderly friend of mine can recall Christmas Eves in

Charente Inferieure (now Charente Maritime) in western

France when her grandfather dropped handfuls of popping

corn in the ashes before the massive, glowing tree trunk in the fireplace. There, the kernels were transformed into what he called
dames blanches
, “white ladies,” dancing in the heat
Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 199

of the fire. In Burgundy, they went one better, for there the smoldering
suche de Noei
actually “gave birth” to little pack-ets of sugar plums when the children weren’t looking.

In most lands, the Yule Log was not quite so fertile. Still, it was a treasure in itself, and on no account should any ashes be thrown away over the Christmas season. Ostensibly, this was so that one would not accidentally hit the Christ Child in the face, but originally, these ashes represented the family’s fortunes and had therefore to be kept close. This explains why to part with even a spark of the home fire at this sacred time of year was to court disaster. Suppose the ancestors

were offended at the casual lending out of their essence and decided to drift out the door after it?

Christmas is the season of good will, but if you were

careless enough to let your own fire go out, you could not expect your neighbors to give you a light. The fizzling of the Yule flames was portentous on several levels. Before the tinderbox came along, it meant a cold bed and a cold board unless you could find some pre-Christmas embers still

smoldering inside the village ash dump. It also meant there would be a death in the household within a year. Lastly and worst of all, it meant that the familial spirits had withdrawn their blessings and the very survival of the line was now in jeopardy. Even today, many families light a fat candle on

200 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

Christmas Eve, placing it in the sink instead of blowing it out when they leave for Midnight Mass.42

No matter if you have washed it with wine, cider or

grain alcohol, there was only one way to light a Yule Log, and that was with a bit of the previous year’s log. The idea was that the Yule fire never really went out, and that no one, whether unbaptized baby or ancient granny, ever really

died, for how could there be death where there was light,

love and warmth?

The First-footer

When and if the revelers finally went to bed on each of the nights between Christmas and New Year’s Eve, the Yule

fire was carefully banked, then stirred to life again the next morning. The question of who was to wake the fire on the

first morning of the New Year was one requiring careful

consideration. Oddly enough, he was not supposed to be a

member of the household.

In the British Isles, he was known as the first-footer and it was best to engage him in advance, for the wrong sort

of person would bring the wrong sort of luck. Throughout

Europe, there was an all but universal consensus that the

first-footer should not be a woman or, especially in Scot-

land, a redhead. If the first person to step over your threshold on New Year’s Day is Nicole Kidman, then you might

42. In 1966, WPIX in New York City came up with a no maintenance solution to the age old problem: a televised Yule Log. It burned merrily all Christmas Eve to a soundtrack of popular Christmas carols, and if you watched it long enough and careful y enough, you would notice the log grow smaller, then larger, then smaller again every few minutes.

Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home 201

as well pack your bags and start over somewhere else, and

if she happens to enter with her left foot, then there’s really no help for you at all.

One of the oldest obligations of the first-footer, who

was preferably tall, dark, handsome and had been born feet first, was to stir the embers of the fire. He would do this before even greeting the master of the house, having first entered without knocking. The Macedonian first-footer

paid homage to the resident spirits by first offering a stone or green twig at the altar of the hearth. Elsewhere in the Balkans, the
polaznik
or, “attendant,” arrived first thing on Christmas Day to strike sparks from the Yule log. The more sparks the better, for each represented a sheep, chicken or moment of happiness in the coming year.

The Chimneysweep

In England, the most desirable first-footer of all was the climbing boy, as underage chimneysweeps were known in

the days when there was no such thing as underage, espe-

cially when it came to dangerous menial labor. When was

the last time you had your chimney cleaned? In coal fire

days, twice a year was the bare minimum; once in three

months was more like it. Skip the chimneysweep and you

would eventually be woken one night by a noise like trick-

ling sand followed by a soft crash as, in the moonlight, a black creature materialized in the fireplace. Larger and

larger it grew, climbing slowly, silently into the room. Could it be one of the dreaded Whisht Hounds who haunt the

moors at Christmastime? No; it was a clod of accumulated

creosote that had dislodged itself from the chimney’s brick
202 Dark Spirits of Hearth and Home

lining and fallen on the grate to rise up in a black cloud, besmirching furniture, carpets and curtains.

Those of us who burn only candles and the occasional

birch log in the fireplace would be unprepared for the amount of soot produced by a coal fire. By the early 1800’s, coal had replaced wood as the preferred kitchen fuel and, except in peat-burning areas, it remained the fuel of choice for a long time afterward. The transition from wood to coal led to the shrinking of the fireplace, which led in turn to the widespread replacement of the Yule Log with the Yule Candle. The popularity of coal also transformed the chimneysweep from a mere tradesman to a talisman. Because coal burns so much more