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

by Sarah Clegg

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