Christmas Every Day

Every year on Old Christmas Day, January 6, a strange game is played in Haxey, Lincolnshire. A Fool, dressed in red rags with a faced smeared with soot and ochre, opens the proceedings by welcoming all present and declaring that the order of the day is

Hoose agin hoose, town agin town, /And if you meet a man knock him down, /But don’t hurt him.

While he is pronouncing this speech he is being ritually fumigated by a bonfire (see below). He then leads his team of red-clad Boggans and their King Boggan, or Lord of the Hood, to a nearby field where the next several hours the men of the parish will contest for the possession of a a series of “hoods” or rolls of canvas, rope and leather. Visits to local pubs are part of the struggle. The game is said to have links to pre-Christian ritual combats performed as a fertility rite.

Yule was the time amongst the pagan Teutons for the sacrifice of a white horse. Christmas too has ceremonies that focus on horses, though not in such a fatal fashion.

For reasons that remain unclear St Stephen has come to be regarded as the patron saint of horses and therefore his day, December 26, is given over to horse parades, races and special treatment for the animals. 

In Wales the Mari Llwyd (“Grey Mare”, pictured above) ceremony involves a man under a white sheet carrying a pole topped by a horse’s head with snapping jaws — it capers, ringing the bells on its sheet, and bites people who have to pay a forfeit to be released. According to legend, the Mari Lwyd is the animal turned out of its stable to make room for the Holy Family; it has been looking for shelter ever since. Accompanied by a group of men, often in mummers’ costumes or bearing bells the Mari Lwyd will approach a house during the Christmas season and the group will beg admittance. After a ritual negotiation that may involve the exchange of humourous verses they will be let inside where the horse will dart about while hospitality is shared.

In England similar horse figures are Old Hob, who went about with a group of men singing and ringing hand bells for a gratuity, and the Hodening Horse of Kent. On the Isle of Man it is the Laare Vane or White Mare which appeared on New Year’s Eve.

In Germany the hobby-horse is called Schimmel (or in some places Schimmelreiter to emphasize the rider). Like the Mari Lwyd it takes part in house visits; jumping about to entertain the children and dancing with pretty girls.

Though Arthur Conan Doyle sold his first Sherlock Holmes story in 1887 to Beeton’s Christmas Annual, “Adventure of the Blue Carbuncle” is the only account of the great detective which deals with Christmas. We learn, in this short piece written for the January 1892 edition of the Strand Magazine, how a battered hat and a Christmas goose lead Holmes to the solution of a mystery, the freeing of an innocent man and the recovery of a giant blue jewel.