The Dead of Winter Quotes

“Those who are gone, those who are leaving us, draw close again at Christmas, whether passing through in Perchta’s hunt, attending ghostly churches on Christmas Eve or conjured by our memories, and we reach out to them.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Like the folklorists spinning beguiling fantasies of ancient pagan rituals, Jerome, Borlase, Dickens and the Jameses (M.R. and Henry) were tapping into the old need for darkness within the new, Victorian, family Christmas, when people were meant to be getting cosy round the tree or roasting chestnuts by the fire with their nearest and dearest, and not rampaging drunkenly through the streets in a horrible mask. The traditions might have shifted, and the tales may have been rendered in a form that could be enjoyed quietly, at home, with your family, but everyone still wanted midwinter to be full of ghosts and monsters.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Jerome K. Jerome used the telling of Christmas Eve ghost stories as a framing device for his 1891 ghost-story collection, Told After Supper, claiming in his introduction that: Whenever five or six English-speaking people meet round a fire on Christmas Eve, they start telling each other ghost stories… It is a genial, festive season, and we love to muse upon graves, and dead bodies, and murders, and blood.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“What if, in some alpine town lost in the snow, or a village buried deep in the English countryside, the Old Ways haven’t been forgotten? What if that town or village is the very same one where I happen to be watching a Krampus run or mummers play right now?”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Behind every tale of Christmas monsters lurks the true darkness of Christmas – the solstice, and the longest night of the year. No matter how brightly our fires burn, or how many fairy lights we turn on, Christmas is still spent deep in the shadows.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“In other places, though, the vibe is different. In the Lombardy town of Guissano, huge figures of witches are dragged through the town to a jaunty drum-beat before they’re burned by a baying crowd. These figures represent real women who were murdered out of hatred, misogyny and ignorance, their effigies paraded to upbeat music and set aflame while people cheer wildly, hideous deaths enacted and re-enacted year on year, celebrated again and again. Of all the monstrous Christmas traditions, this is one I have no wish to attend.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“However it happened, by the early thirteenth century the connections between the Good Ladies, the striga-women and Christmas were fixed, with one text claiming that: On the night of Christ’s Nativity they set the table for the Queen of Heaven, whom people call Frau Holda, that she might help them.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“In the fourteenth century, the name Perchta started being used to refer to these women. With the name derived from the word ‘Epiphany’, it may be that Perchta herself was part of a medieval tradition of personifying festivals. From the early fourteenth century on, over the Twelve Nights of Christmas Perchtas joined the gang, roaming about at night, bringing prosperity to those who left them food, occasionally eating babies, disembowelling people and stuffing them with straw. St Lucy, sweet, innocent and pure, would be absorbed into all of this as well – a girl associated with Christmas and midwinter because of the date of her saint’s day, pulled into the pack of semi-benevolent monstrous Christmas women.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Look into Bavarian and Austrian tradition further and there is another witch monster who bears a striking similarity to Lucy: Perchta. Rather than travelling on Lucy’s Night, Perchta conducts her grim business on the Twelve Nights of Christmas or the week after Lucy’s Night (a period known as the Christmas Ember Days), and is especially associated with Epiphany itself. In fact, it’s where Perchta’s name likely comes from – and why it sounds so similar to the ‘Perchten’ monsters mentioned in the chapter before – both were named after the day they appeared.vii But in all other regards, Lucy and Perchta are almost identical – rewarding good children and gutting the bad before stuffing them with straw (Perchta adds the flourish of sewing up her victims using a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread); obsessed with the idea that the tasks of the household – especially weaving – must be completed and set aside before their nights begin, and demanding food offerings be left out for them, bringing good luck where they find them and bad where they do not.viii There’s another Christmas witch too – though an altogether kinder one – the Befana. An Italian variant, Befana, like Perchta, appears on Epiphany, and, like Perchta, she takes her name from the festival. She also gives good children sweets, but the bad children who meet Befana only have to contend with gifts of coal rather than being gutted. The history of these Christmas witches may well be one of the most complex of all the seasonal monsters. After all, only an utter mess of tangling beliefs can lead to a semi-benevolent, disembowelling witch who demands offerings, gives presents, and flies across the land followed by an army of the dead.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white vision I’ve just seen outside the cathedral. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and, sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptised. Going house to house with her terrifying entourage, she looks for the food that has been left out for her. If all is well, she’ll eat the offerings and bring good fortune in return, and if she encounters any good children on her way she gives them treats. But if the food offerings are incorrect or forgotten, and if Lucy finds that the tasks of the household – especially those related to weaving – have not been finished and laid aside for her celebration, she brings disorder, bad luck and death. If she finds children who have misbehaved, she’ll gut them, pull out their organs, stuff them full of straw, and sew them back up again. Sometimes she’s depicted holding a distaff with a child’s intestines twined around it, an impressive combining of the normally very separate interests of cloth-making and disembowelling.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“And then, slowly, I realise I can hear something – a low, jangling discordant music accompanied by screaming laughter, faint at first but growing ever louder, ever closer. I catch a glimpse of curling, gigantic horns silhouetted against the Christmas lights, and then, suddenly, the street is swarming with monsters. With masks depicting terrifying leering grimaces, mouths filled with jagged teeth, huge horns (often over a metre high), and costumes of shaggy pelts, these are the Krampuses. They are enormous – many of the Krampus performers wear platforms on their shoes to give them extra height, and the bulk of the pelts and horns make them even larger, towering over the spectators. They walk with a loping, swinging tread that only renders them more menacing, more animalistic, and serves to shake the giant cowbells that are strapped to their backs – this is the hideous music that accompanies them, so loud you have to yell to be heard. Every Krampus carries a switch.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“In the Victorian era, the wildness of Christmas wasn’t just tamed – it became thoroughly domesticated. The new fashion for Christmas celebrations embraced the festivities, the good cheer and the parties, but also set them firmly inside the home. Family was becoming central to Christmas, with Queen Victoria and Prince Albert portraying themselves celebrating in domestic bliss, surrounded by their children.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“It lends a new sense of chilling dark magic to all the Christmas monsters-- a feeling that... I'm walking the same paths as my ancestors, and that I might find something shadowy and terrifying walking with me.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Sixty years after Frazer’s Golden Bough, the poet Robert Graves wrote The White Goddess, a book entirely made up of delightful nonsense about pagan rituals and asserting that the death-and-resurrection mummers plays were ‘the clearest survivals of the pre-Christian religion’. This in turn inspired Sylvia Plath, who found herself identifying with Grave’s goddess – a sister of Holda – who he put at the centre of it all. It inspired books like Susan Cooper’s The Dark Is Rising, the children’s story from 1973 about the dark, pagan magic that bleeds through into Christmas and midwinter. Plenty of our most beloved horror stories are based on these ideas too, from The Wicker Man to Midsommar and, arguably, the entire genre of folk horror.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“You might notice that in all of this there is a distinct lack of Krampus-gods, Wild Hunts, sacrificial fertility rites, and ceremonial Christmas murders. In fact, this was probably spoiled for you already by this entire book, which has detailed how most of these traditions appeared, and hasn’t mentioned Christmassy murder rituals once.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Excavations at Durrington Walls have given us even more evidence of the midwinter festivities in the distant past – there were, apparently, huge midwinter pork feasts there.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“But once, on midwinter morning, this is where the party was. Durrington Walls is (probably) where the builders of Stonehenge lived and is the site of another circle made of enormous wooden posts, known today as the Southern Circle. Recreations of the Circle show it as a surreal forest of gigantic, bare tree trunks, angular, geometric, full of long, straight lines and long straight shadows. And this site, unlike Stonehenge, was orientated towards the midwinter sunrise. It was in use at the same time as Stonehenge as well – so perhaps people welcomed the sun in the wood and bid it farewell among the stones.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“This magic is, in part, the knowledge that the relentless tide of darkness has turned, that light will start to return. It’s partly the happiness surrounding me – the earnest cheers and song, the well wishes shouted by strangers in a moment of happy abandon that we’re all experiencing together, huddled in the strange circle of stones. But it’s also the way that, in the moment of the sun’s rising, the vast gulfs of history and understanding that separate us from the builders of Stonehenge seem to vanish. It’s so easy to imagine that over five millennia ago people might have stood right where we are standing, looked at the same dawn, the same stones, might have celebrated that they, too, were beginning the long road back out of the winter darkness. There is so much power in that sensation of connection, the feeling of seeing a handprint millennia old and instinctively slipping your own hand over it, of all that time contracting so you and people thousands of years ago are – for a brief instant – the same.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“With me is a glorious assortment of people – druids, women in flower crowns, a man wearing only a tank top with blue paint smeared across his body, someone dressed as a pterodactyl. For some, this is one of the most important days on their religious calendar, for others it’s a bit of early morning Christmas fun.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“The Christmas witches themselves remained powerful and benevolent (if treated correctly), retained their wild night rights, their entourages, their offerings, ready to appear anew each Christmas, to remind us of the dreams of freedom and power that were perverted by the witch trials.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“In 1457, just before the witch trials really got underway, in the valley of Fassa in the South Tyrol three women confessed to nocturnal dancing with ‘The Good Ladies’ during the Ember Days. The women were lucky that the true witch panic had yet to begin – they were found guilty, but their lives were spared. Only fifty years later, and around ten miles away, a man named Giovanni delle Piatte claimed he had met Herodias, after which he feasted and flew around the world over Christmas. Giovanni managed to avoid any worse punishment than banishment – by accusing fourteen other ‘witches’ of having been there with him. Holda, Perchta, Herodias, and the witches travelling to dark revels in packs, all ran through witchcraft trials.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“In the early eleventh century AD, a monk called Orderic Vitalis recorded a tale that had been told to him by a young priest, Walchelin. Returning from a sick call late at night, the priest had heard what he thought sounded like an approaching army. Taking shelter between four medlar trees he watched as the group approached, and saw to his horror that it was not a living army but a procession of the dead, all being punished for the sins they had committed while they were alive. Passing by his hiding place, Walchelin saw thieves forced to tote impossibly heavy sacks of their ill-gotten loot, a murderer whipped by demons, ‘lecherous’ women on saddles made of nails, plenty of badly behaved knights – even a segment of corrupt churchmen, which caused Orderic to muse that while men faultily judge from external appearances of goodness, God knows better.xiii This is the first attestation we have of a group of the dead parading through the night, and, according to Orderic, like all good monsters, they had a fondness for Christmastime – Walchelin stumbled across them on 1 January.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Again, Burchard’s list of penances is a showcase for these folkloric female figures: Have you prepared the table in your house and set on the table your food and drink, with three knives, that if those three sisters whom past generations and old-time foolishness called the Fates should come, they may take refreshment there?2 According to Burchard, the belief held that once the Fates had eaten from your table, they would help ‘either now or in the future’. The practice he’s referencing seems to relate to a common early medieval tradition of leaving out food for a group of women who travelled by night, and who would bring prosperity in return. Often led by a figure called Satia or Abundia (names meaning ‘Satisfaction’ and ‘Abundance’ in Latin – a set that ‘Holda’ fits right into), or generically referred to as ‘The Good Ladies’, they went to homes at night, consuming the offerings that had been left out for them and bringing good luck in return. It’s worth noting as well that their ‘consumption’ is magical – anything they eat returns untouched in the morning, much like the devoured children and organs consumed by the night-travelling strigas.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“Have you believed or participated in this infidelity, that some wicked women, turned back after Satan, seduced by illusions and phantoms of demons believe and affirm: that with Diana, the goddess of the pagans, and an unnumbered multitude of women, they ride on certain beasts and traverse many areas of the earth in the stillness of the quiet night.1 This isn’t the only mention Burchard made of women riding out at night in a host led by a goddess – of his two hundred or so rules, it’s the subject of four. And numerous other medieval churchmen complained about this idea as well as Burchard, a collection of angry fragments that suggests it was a commonly held belief, no matter how much the church might have tried to stamp it out. Sometimes the goddess leading the women is called Holda or Herodias, not Diana. Sometimes the women are able to pass through closed doors to sneak away in spirit, leaving their bodies lying in bed with their husbands while their souls cavort through the night.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“The teasing is perhaps best embodied in a statue on a fountain in the Swiss town of Bern. Sculpted in the 1500s, it shows the child-eater stuffing a child into his unnaturally enormous mouth, with several more children stuffed into a bag at his side. It’s hideously unpleasant but painted in bright colours, perched on a pole that shows dancing animals in amusing hats and a favourite of local children. He’s fun and scary at the same time, bright, terrifying and frozen in place – able to horrify but not able to attack.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“There are plenty of variants of Krampus runs scattered through Europe, especially in the Alpine regions. In some, the performers are separated from the public by metal fencing and the worst the monsters can do is rattle the railings or swipe at the spectators standing too close. Given the mayhem of Salzburg, I can see why some town councils and attendees prefer to be a little safer and a little more removed from the Krampuses (though if I’m entirely honest, it sounds a lot less fun). In other places, the spectacle is more stage managed, with pyrotechnics, fog effects, and a soundtrack of heavy metal rather than clanking cow bells. In some places, modern additions to the Krampus outfits, like glowing LED eyes, are forbidden, in others they’re happily embraced. Plenty of Krampus groups do house calls as well as the main run (some, joyously, allow for house visits to be booked online on the Krampus group’s website). In other places, the Krampuses take part in a short play with St Nicholas before they rampage through the town.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“There is a gap of about three to four hundred years where the Christmas horned monsters aren’t attested in the sources, where the complaining churchmen found other things to moan about, and the folklorists had yet to appear. It is, technically, possible that the tradition of parading snapping, horned animal heads on poles at Christmastime died out across Europe in the fifteenth century, and then re-appeared during the eighteenth in a completely unconnected form that happened to look extremely similar. But it feels like the simplest explanation is that the traditions were related, that the Christmas horned animal costumes of the eighteenth, nineteenth and twentieth centuries were an extension of the Christmas stag guises from Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“In the Vienna Folklore Museum is a yellowing wooden goat head on a pole. It has flapping black ears, short, curved horns, wide black eyes and an enormous, gaping, snapping mouth, lined with sharp little rows of carved wooden teeth. The jaw is rigged so that it snaps closed when the performer, holding the pole and hidden beneath a sheet, pulls on a thin piece of string dangling from the back of the monster’s head. This creature is called a Habergeiß, a name almost certainly related to goats (‘geiß’ is the Austrian for ‘goat’) and it can be found prowling the streets and snapping at the unwary in Bavarian towns over Epiphany.ix Over in Poland there’s the Turon, another horned, shaggy monster head with a clacking jaw that’s held on a pole by a performer under a sheet. The Turon is led on a rope house to house, where its escort sings carols and the Turon jumps and claps his jaw, chasing the householders. In Romania there are the Corlata, monsters who appear at the end of the year led by groups visiting houses, and are made from (you’ll never guess) a horned, wooden head – a stag’s, this time – with a clacking jaw, held on a pole by a performer who hides under a sheet (although the sheet that covers the Corlata can often be extremely brightly patterned – one photograph from 2010 shows it covered in brilliant flowers). In North-East Germany there’s the Klapperbock (the snapping buck), in the Italian Tyrol there are the Schanppvieh – snapbeasts (although these normally appeared at Carnival rather than Christmas). In Switzerland there’s the Schnabelgeiß, the ‘beak goat’, which looks like all the other goat monsters except that the snout narrows to a point, to take the form of a beak. In Finland and Sweden there are the Nuuttipukki, more stags who bother householders, this time on St Knut’s Day, on 13 January (hence their name). And we’ve already come across the Finnish Julebukk – the Yule goat – another goat monster portrayed by a performer hiding under a sheet, this time made of animal hides. In some parts of Lithuania and Silesia, meanwhile, there was the Schimmelreiter – the grey rider – which came with a new innovation. As in Britain, this monster was a horse, with a snapping head that was often a horse’s skull held on a pole, but this one was played by multiple people and could be ridden.x It starts to feel like you can’t go to Europe over the Christmas period without being snapped at by an animal head on a pole, held by a performer lurking under a cloth.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“whether or not the guisers started out as terrible monsters, they rapidly became so. And whether or not the midwinter season was one of terror in pre-Christian Europe, having hordes of demons lumbering through town over the festive period made it so for everyone who came later. Part and parcel of the tradition of Christmas guising is a whole complex of beliefs that hold that Christmas is a time of genuine darkness, of real monsters and horrors that stalk the midwinter nights.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

“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.”
― Sarah Clegg, The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures