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

by Sarah Clegg

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.