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

by Sarah Clegg

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 on the top of the head, the wood around it worn down from the repeated pulling. We even have a photo of the monster in action, taken in 1907. In it, the performer is standing upright under the sheet, his shape making the creature look like a weird, bipedal hunchback, the manic smile of its open mou...