The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

by Sarah Clegg

Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose, who travels house to house every Christmas leading a cavalcade of the dead. If she finds a child who hasn’t done their chores she slits open their belly, pulls out their guts, stuffs them with straw, and then sews up the wound with a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread.

There’s Krampus, a hideous, towering demon with enormous horns who beats children with a switch or steals them away, and who rampages through Germany and Austria every 5 December.

Iceland, there’s Grýla, an ogress who comes down from the mountains at Christmas and is inclined to eat her victims, popping them into a giant stew while her murderous cat – the Yule Cat – prowls at her side.

In France, there’s Père Fouettard – Father Whipper – a butcher who had kidnapped, murdered and tried to pickle three young boys, before he was stopped by St Nicholas. As punishment, according to the legend, he was forced to accompany St Nicholas for the rest of eternity, a looming figure lurking...

Year Walk, or årsgång, a tradition that has been attested for centuries in Swedish folklore, which tells how a walk taken before dawn on Christmas Eve, without eating or drinking, without talking to anyone, without looking into a fire, will show the future. More specifically, it should show me shadowy enactments of the burials of anyone who will die in the village this coming year.

Showing fear is one of the ways to summon these monsters – or stop the magic altogether. Laughter will also break the spell, and though someone might be unlikely to burst into giggles at the sight of an unhappy revenant or a horrifying pig, there is a Year Walk story in which two tiny, farting rats appeared in the path of the walker, causing him to laugh and forgo his chance of seeing the future. No farting rats, walking corpses, or multi-eyed sows appear in front of me this morning, but no ghostly funeral processions cross into the graveyard either.

explicit cross-dressing is also associated with Carnival, and I encounter plenty of women wearing traditionally male outfits, and dresses worn with beards. There’s even a greeting ‘Siora Maschera’ – ‘Ms Mask’ – that can be used for anyone – man, woman, rich, poor – since anyone could be anyone behind a mask.iv

Saturnalia – the feast of the god Saturn – started on 17 December,

According to his near-contemporary Seneca, it was a time when ‘licence had been granted to public self-indulgence’, and everyone was ‘drunk and vomiting’,2 giving in to excess and luxury with wild abandon. People gave gifts, but they were often gag gifts, so that the emperor Augustus himself was apparently giving people ‘nothing but hair, cloth, sponges, pokers and tongs, and other such things under misleading names of double meaning’.3vi Normal societal rules were suspended, so that gambling, usually illegal, was allowed and hierarchies were switched and swapped, so that during the Saturnalia slaves were served a feast by their masters, and given ‘licence’ to speak freely. They were also allowed to recline to eat – stretching out on the long couches that were, for most of the year, the preserve of male citizens. Meanwhile men stopped wearing togas, and instead put on an item of Greek clothing called a ‘synthesis’ – we don’t know too much about how this garment looked, but it does seem to have been colourful and it was certainly out of the ordinary. Citizens and slaves alike also donned a ‘pilleus’, a type of cap that was normally worn only by freed slaves, so that a social status that had previously been obvious from clothing alone was, at least partially, obscured. But if one set of hierarchies was pulled down, another one was put up in its place. Often via games of knucklebones or dice, groups of friends would elect a ‘king of Saturnalia’. This king was ‘absolute monarc...

king of Saturnalia (and used the occasion to humiliate his step-brother by forcing him to sing in front of a drunken crowd). According to Lucian, writing in the second century, Saturnalia was a time of: Drinking, noise and games and dice, appointing of kings and feasting of slaves, singing naked, clapping of frenzied hands, an occasional ducking of corked faces in icy water.4 This loss of rules and hierarchy supposedly recalled the ‘golden age’ of Saturn, when no one was a slave, no one held property, and ‘all things were common to all’,5 a brief restoration of

people lit fires scented with saffron, wore nice clothes, and weren’t supposed to argue, and if all that wasn’t thrilling enough, there was also a stately procession of the new consuls to the Capitol. But the spirit of Saturnalia only had to slip forwards by a few short days to spill into the Kalends celebrations. By the fourth century AD, the Greek writer Libanius was describing how Kalends was a three-day festival that – like Saturnalia – revolved around gift giving, drunkenness and excessive eating, along with a shifting of normal rules and hierarchies so that slaves could be lazy, or even drunk, without punishment; rules were relaxed, and masters and slaves played dice together as they welcomed in the new year. People danced, joked, sang, and some of the more tedious individuals battered on the doors of shops to keep their owners awake all night. It was a time of riotous excess and wild fun. And while the pagan Libanius broadly approved of the festivities that attended Kalends, the Christian church was not as happy

audience of slightly baffled tourists. It’s even more prominent in other Carnival celebrations around the world, and often makes a political point – in Germany in 2024 in the Cologne Carnival parade there were floats made to mock Donald Trump and the German far-right party, while the New Orleans Carnival saw parades that incorporated protests for Palestine.

And the figure who ended up ushering some chaos into the church calendar was, surprisingly, Herod.

The 28th of December was the Feast of the Holy Innocents

in the mid-twelfth century, the Feast of Fools was established. This new celebration seems to have started in France, and stemmed from a 1 January feast day, the Feast of Circumcision (celebrating the circumcision of Christ eight days following his birth), which had also become the day that the subdeacons – the lowest of the clerical orders – were honoured. It might well have begun in a fairly calm manner, but being on the same date as Kalends and celebrating the most junior clerics was a recipe for turning social hierarchies on their head and it wasn’t long before it was all getting a bit out of hand. Despite being a part of the liturgy, despite being celebrated by members of the church, the church itself was soon complaining about it vehemently. Around fifty years after the Feast of Fools is first attested, the Pope himself was up in arms against its ‘scandalous stupidities’ and ‘obscene revellings’.11 And yet, the people loved it, just as they did Kalends, and despite irritating the Pope himself, it continued to be celebrated – and to spread. By the early thirteenth century, bishops in England were complaining about it as well, furious at the misbehaviour they were witnessing.xi By the fifteenth century, things were somehow even more anarchic. A letter written by the faculty of theology in the University of Paris to the prelates of France is so full of grumpiness about the nonsense that attended the feast that it’s a joy to read. According to the faculty letter, the pri...

church might have wished for the Twelve Days of Christmas to be entirely devoted to a celebration of Christ, the unruly mayhem continued, with its highpoint often coming on Epiphany or Twelfth Night (hence Shakespeare’s play of the same name, which is full of drinking, pranks and cross-dressing). And a new practice was emerging – or, at least, an old one in a slightly different guise. Starting in the late medieval period, the kings of France had begun electing their own Christmas rulers to preside over the celebrations – the kings of Saturnalia and the Popes of Fools made

It’s not a coincidence that the word for a Carnival mask – ‘larva’ – also translates as ‘ghost’. Seeing the figure lingering in the darkness, in that silent, empty night, the white face glowing in the street light, feels like a haunting.

it’s St George who fights a Turkish Knight instead of King William fighting Little Man John. The Christmas play in London on Bankside uses the same names, as does the one in St Albans. Elsewhere in the Cotswolds there’s a variant play with Robin Hood; in Scotland the St George character is called Galoshin. Sometimes, the murderer is simply called ‘Slasher’. In some Irish variants, it’s St Patrick against the evil Oliver Cromwell. Beelzebub hops through the majority of them, collecting money from the audience, Father Christmas almost always announces the proceedings, and in most cases the victim is revived by a doctor.

often the players dress as their characters, St George wearing a cheap Crusading-knight costume from Amazon; Robin Hood in a feathered hat and holding a bow and arrow.iii But they are all, to a one, disturbing to watch, dancing with devils and centring on Slashers and murderers, and all of them have the feel of a ritual that taps into something utterly ancient, something with a profound significance that is now all but lost.

earlier tradition of going door to door has numerous different names (including, unhelpfully, mumming), but the most common one (and the one I’ll be using here) is ‘guising’.

Unlike the death-and-resurrection mummers play, dated so securely (and so disappointingly) to the eighteenth century, Christmas guising is over 1,500 years old: wearing costumes and masks was associated with Kalends from at least Late Antiquity. Alongside the clergy complaining about topsy-turvy social disorder, there were just as many bemoaning that people were dressing up and going from door to door demanding food, drink and money. In the mid-fourth century AD, Bishop Ambrose of Milan recorded a tradition ‘of the common people’, where on 1 January they disguised themselves as stags. His contemporary, Bishop Pacian of Barcelona, wrote a short treatise condemning the act (called Cervus – ‘stags’). The treatise hasn’t survived, but we do have Pacian’s rueful (and endearing) musing that many people who hadn’t previously known about the practice had read his treatise, thought dressing as a stag on 1 January sounded quite fun, and started doing it themselves. ‘I think,’ he reflected, ‘that they would not have known how to make themselves into stags unless I had shown them by reprimanding them.’1 At the very least, Pacian’s treatise doesn’t seem to have stopped anyone – a hundred and fifty years or so later, in Arles in France, Bishop Caesarius gave a New Year’s sermon in which he furiously complained about men who went about on the first day of January

In 1348, people in the court of Edward III dressed up as animals over Christmas. In the earliest sources from Iceland, meanwhile – that is, in the mid-thirteenth century – there are hints of a house-visiting tradition featuring men dressed as the ogress Grýla. Even Bishops started to get in on the fun – in 1406, the Bishop of Salisbury enjoyed ‘disguisings’ in his manor during the Twelve Days of Christmas. The Boy Bishops, as well, went door to door demanding treats, mirroring the actions of the guisers even if they weren’t dressed as monsters themselves. Christmas guising may even lie at the heart of one of the best-known medieval poems – Gawain and the Green Knight. The opening of the poem takes place during the Christmas celebrations of King Arthur’s court. Amid the feasting and merrymaking, a terrible, bizarre figure comes through the gates – a giant man, entirely green and riding a green horse, carrying a stick of holly in one hand and an axe in the other. He has come, he says, for a Christmas game. Any man can strike him with his axe, on the condition that a year and a day hence the blow will be returned. Gawain accepts the challenge, and, thinking to avoid receiving any blow in return, beheads the Green Knight. But the knight – horrifyingly – does not fall even as his head rolls across the floor. Instead, he reaches out with his enormous hand, picks his head back up again, mounts his horse, and reminds Gawain that in a year and a day the blow will be returned. As he...

The word ‘wassail’ first appeared in the eighth century in the poem Beowulf, and seems to have been a toast (at the very least, it was a shout that should echo through courts and begin the revels of warriors). By the fourteenth century, we have mentions of communal drinking bowls that could be passed person to person with cries of ‘wassail’ and ‘drinkhail’ and an exchange of kisses. And while cheery toasting at mass get-togethers sounds very Christmassy, it was only in the sixteenth century that wassail bowls are firmly placed in the Christmas season, appearing at a Twelfth Night party in Henley in England. Their Christmas popularity grew, though, so that eventually even Henry VIII had his own wassail bowl. By the seventeenth century, groups of women were taking the bowl door to door and offering a drink in exchange for food or money. Soon, monsters were tagging along on the visits, as the wassailing tradition melded with Christmas door-to-door guising, and the bowl, more often than not, was left at home. By the nineteenth century wassailing could be just another word for Christmas guising – no apples or bowls necessary. This was the wassailing to which the Mari Lwyd was originally attached. But from the late sixteenth century on in Southern England, wassailing had moved in another direction. Instead of taking the bowl house to house, wassailing groups would take it into the orchards or fields over Christmas and the New Year to bid good health to trees and crops. Other bit...

as well – the Blackthorn Wassail held by Newton Court Cider is another orchard wassailing, with plenty of Mari Lwyds in attendance, monsters that have, late in life, turned to driving out evil rather than just causing it. On Old New Year (13 January)

According to tradition, when the Mari party calls at the door, you might just be able to avoid letting them in – as long as you’re a good enough poet and can hold a tune. Right now, standing on the threshold of the Maestag Corner House, Gwyn Evans breaks into song – a beautifully rich baritone that resounds through the little pub. The words are in Welsh, but a handy translation has been provided in a little printed leaflet I’ve been given:

Well here we come, Harmless friends, To ask permission To sing. This is the beginning of a ‘pwnco’, a rhyming call-and-response game that was once carried out between the Mari party and the residents of whatever house they’d chosen to approach. If the householders wanted the ghostly horse and its retinue gone, they’d have to outwit them in the game. We do have some surviving records of responses to the Mari Lwyd. Normally, they attack the rhyming and singing abilities of the Mari party (‘The dogs and the cats are retreating into the holes on hearing such voices’ or perhaps ‘The kettle and the frying pan are bouncing on the hearthstone on hearing such low quality rhyme’2). But these formulaic survivals are not a perfect preservation of the practice. In many cases we hear of the rhyming being spontaneous – lyrical insults conjured on the spot. There is an account of one such battle in 1850, when a householder decided that the Mari party were not welcome in his house, given that they’d caused chaos there the year before, and used his skilful versifying to win the pwnco and drive the monster away.vi But by 1909, people were already mourning that the ‘ready rhymesters’ and ‘genuine wits’3 who had previously given the pwnco such creativity and excitement were gone. The formulaic call and response were what remained. There is no response to the Mari’s pwnco at the Corner House in Maestag, formulaic or otherwise. After the singing stops the leader and his Mari enter, unhindered an...

pole about ten feet in length, and a string is affixed to the lower jaw: a horse-cloth is also attached to the whole under which a member of the part gets, and by frequently pulling the string, keeps up a loud snapping noise and is accompanied by the rest of the party, grotesquely habited, with hand bells, they thus process from house to house, ringing their bells ...

This might be an account of any Mari Lwyd (barring the astonishing length of the pole), but here in England it was called a Hoodening – a term likely...

was hooded by the sheet. And like the Mari Lwyd, the hoodening tradition continues to be enacted, normally in Kent, Yorkshire and Derbyshire – although most, now, use wooden horse heads rather than skulls.viii By all rights, the wooden version should be a lot less terrifying, but there is something utterly, intentionally unsettling about every one of the hoodening heads. The hooden horse from Walmer Court, dating to the 1850s and held in the Deal Museum, is a perfect example. Decorated with red and white rosettes, and with a trio of bells perched on its head, it’s made from two flat rectangles of wood painted a dark muddy brown. The two rectangles are hinged at one end to made a snapping jaw, with little carved wooden teeth at the front. With its long, thin snout and gaping mouth it looks more like a strange alligator than a horse. A leather bridle snakes its way over the head, and on the top are two painted eyes – white circles with a black dot in the middle, wild and staring. Two leather ears, nailed in place, stick out at the top of the head, the crumbling orange cloth that the performer hid under hanging from the back. A string to open and shut the mouth comes through a hole...

the Vienna Folklore Museum is a yellowing wooden goat head on a pole. It has flapping black ears, short, curved horns, wide black eyes and an enormous, gaping, snapping mouth, lined with sharp little rows of carved wooden teeth. The jaw is rigged so that it snaps closed when the performer, holding the pole and hidden beneath a sheet, pulls on a thin piece of string dangling from the back of the monster’s head. This creature is called a Habergeiß, a name almost certainly related to goats (‘geiß’ is the Austrian for ‘goat’) and it can be found prowling the streets and snapping at the unwary in Bavarian towns over Epiphany.ix Over in Poland there’s the Turon, another horned, shaggy monster head with a clacking jaw that’s held on a pole by a performer under a sheet. The Turon is led on a rope house to house, where its escort sings carols and the Turon jumps and claps his jaw, chasing the householders. In Romania there are the Corlata, monsters who appear at the end of the year led by groups visiting houses, and are made from (you’ll never guess) a horned, wooden head – a stag’s, this time – with a clacking jaw, held on a pole by a performer who

hides under a sheet (although the sheet that covers the Corlata can often be extremely brightly patterned – one photograph from 2010 shows it covered in brilliant flowers). In North-East Germany there’s the Klapperbock (the snapping buck), in the Italian Tyrol there are the Schanppvieh – snapbeasts (although these normally appeared at Carnival rather than Christmas). In Switzerland there’s the Schnabelgeiß, the ‘beak goat’, which looks like all the other goat monsters except that the snout narrows to a point, to take the form of a beak. In Finland and Sweden there are the Nuuttipukki, more stags who bother householders, this time on St Knut’s Day, on 13 January (hence their name). And we’ve already come across the Finnish Julebukk – the Yule goat – another goat monster portrayed by a performer hiding under a sheet, this time made of animal hides. In some parts of Lithuania and Silesia, meanwhile, there was the Schimmelreiter – the grey rider – which came with a new innovation. As in Britain, this monster was a horse, with a snapping head that was often a horse’s skull held on a pole, but this one was played by multiple people and could be ridden.x It starts to feel like you can’t go to Europe over the Christmas period without being snapped at by an animal head on a pole, held by a performer lurking under a cloth. It seems likely that this vast horde of horned, snapping monsters running about over Christmas were related to the stags,

St Lucy, who, with her saint’s day in the depths of winter and a name derived from the Latin word for light, has come to be thought of not just as a saint, but as the light coming back into the winter darkness.ii

Lucy ceremonies like this take place across the Nordic countries, some just as magnificent, others far more lowkey. The ceremonies started in the 1930s in Sweden, but the tradition of girls dressing as Lucy with a crown of candles and a white robe (normally to serve a breakfast of Lucy buns to the household) dates back to at least the nineteenth century. St Lucy herself, of course, is far older. According to her myths she was a young Christian girl living in Syracuse in the fourth century AD who turned down a suitor because she had promised her virginity to God and wished to give her dowry to the poor. One of her good deeds was bringing food and water to the Christians who had been forced to hide in the city’s catacombs because of the governor’s religious persecution. Lucy – according to the story – needed a light to find her way in the darkness, but in order to free up her hands so she could bring as many provisions as possible she wore a wreath of candles on her head as a kind of prototype head-torch.iii Eventually she was martyred, in some accounts, by having her eyes gouged out,iv murdered by the Christianity-hating governor when her rejected suitor reported her religion to the authorities.

My Finnish hosts have already told me a different story of Lucy – that her hated suitor claimed her eyes were the most beautiful in the world, so she gouged them out and sent them to him, pointing out that now he had her eyes he could leave her alone. The story is clearly a play on the legends of her losing her eyes in her martyrdom, but twisted into a delightfully nasty little fairy story. It’s telling, as well, that while most saints have a saint’s day, Lucy has her night.

This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white vision I’ve just seen outside the cathedral. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and, sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptised. Going house to house with her terrifying entourage, she looks for the food that has been left out for her. If all is well, she’ll eat the offerings and bring good fortune in return, and if she encounters any good children on her way she gives them treats. But if the food offerings are incorrect or forgotten, and if Lucy finds that the tasks of the household – especially those related to weaving – have not been finished and laid aside for her celebration, she brings disorder, bad luck and death. If she finds children who have misbehaved, she’ll gut them, pull out their organs, stuff them full of straw, and sew them back up again. Sometimes she’s depicted holding a distaff with a child’s intestines twined around it, an impressive combining of the normally very separate interests of cloth-making and disembowelling. Inevitably for a Christmas monster, guisers used to dress as Lucy, going house to house veiled and wrapped in white sheets, holding knives and empty bowls which they cry to be filled with blood and guts. Hideous, haggish and often sporting an enormous nose (sometimes represented as a cone that covers her face entirely, so she looks like a creature from a Dr Seuss-b...

Christmas witch too – though an altogether kinder one – the Befana. An Italian variant, Befana, like Perchta, appears on Epiphany, and, like Perchta, she takes her name from the festival. She also gives good children sweets, but the bad children who meet Befana only have to contend with gifts of coal rather than being gutted. The history of these Christmas witches may well be one of the most complex of all the seasonal monsters. After all, only an utter mess of tangling beliefs can lead to a semi-benevolent, disembowelling witch who demands offerings, gives presents, and flies across the land followed by an army of the dead.

magical woman who wasn’t directly Christian, whether or not the woman in question had anything to do with hunting or the moon (perhaps because Diana is the only pagan goddess whose name appears in the Bible). Herodias, meanwhile, is a figure who lived very much in grey areas, at least in medieval folklore. In the Bible she’s the wife of King Herod, but in stories told in the Middle Ages she was his daughter, who fell in love with John the Baptist. When her father found out, he ordered the saint beheaded. Herodias went to kiss the severed head, but John the Baptist (who had never returned her love, and was presumably unimpressed by how the entire mess has turned out for him) blew her away, up into the sky, where she spent the rest of eternity dancing and parading through the night – an obvious figure to lead other women in the darkness, and one who, though connected to plenty of evil deeds, was not evil herself. ‘Holda’ is even more positive. Her name seems to relate to an early German word huld – which means ‘friendly’ or ‘gracious’ – hardly a quality you’d associate with murderous bands of monsters.

Washington Irving, in his book of Christmas traditions, Old Christmas, also remembered the telling of ghost stories – in his case, about a ghostly Crusading knight – at Christmas. Even Dickens, advocating so influentially for the more wholesome Christmas, did so through a ghost story in A Christmas Carol. Like the folklorists spinning beguiling fantasies of ancient pagan rituals, Jerome, Borlase, Dickens and the Jameses (M.R. and Henry) were tapping into the old need for darkness within the new, Victorian, family Christmas, when people were meant to be getting cosy round the tree or roasting chestnuts by the fire with their nearest and dearest, and not rampaging drunkenly through the streets in a horrible mask. The traditions might have shifted, and the tales may have been rendered in a form that could be enjoyed quietly, at home, with your family, but everyone still wanted midwinter to be full of ghosts and monsters.