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

by Sarah Clegg

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...