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

by Sarah Clegg

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...