Christmas Every Day

St Lucia’s Day

Saint Lucia or Lucy was a Christian virgin of Catania, Sicily who was martyred in the persecutions of the late third century. After various travels her relics ended up in Venice where the song “Santa Lucia” is part of the repertoire of singing gondoliers to this day. Because her feast day fell on December 13, the date of the winter solstice before calendar reform, her legend became entwined with the midwinter festivals of various parts of Europe. In Sweden the story is told of a terrible famine in the Middle Ages which was relieved by the arrival of a ship bearing food and a beautiful, radiant woman in white at the helm; in Syracuse, Sicily they speak of a famine in the midst of which folk went to the church of St Lucia to pray whereupon a grain ship sailed into the harbour. In both Italy and Sweden she represents light and the promise of the renewal of spring. Some scholars [not me] say that the Swedish version of Lucia is actually a descendant of the Christ Child who was the Protestant Reformation’s replacement for St Nicholas. The Christkindl in Germany, where many of Sweden’s Christmas customs originated, was often depicted as a white-clad young girl and it is said that this figure was adopted by Swedes in the west part of the country to personify the celebrations that traditionally began on December 13. By the early twentieth century  Lucia was a popular figure all across the country.

 In Sweden on December 13 a “Lucy Bride”, a girl dressed in white with a red sash and a crown of candles and lingon berries, has ceremonial responsibilities. In the home she will bring coffeee and cakes to her parents. In schools or public institutions she leads a parade of similarly-clad young women and Star Boys. Across Europe December 13 will be a time of bonfires and torchlit parades. In the Tyrol Lucia is a gift-bringer who delivers presents to girls while St Nicholas attends to the boys.

 There is a dark side as well to the Lucia figure. Because the depths of midwinter are believed to be a time of increased demonic activity Lucia is sometimes identified with witches or monsters. In parts of Germany she is the Lutzelfrau, a witch who rides the winds and has to be bribed with gifts; in some parts of central Europe Lucy takes the form of a nanny goat rewarding good children and threatening to disembowl the bad. In Iceland she is identified as an ogre. The night before her feast day is therefore held to be a good time for ceremonies to drive away evil spirits with lights, noise and incense. At midnight, Austrians believed that a special light, the Luzieschein, appeared outdoors and would reveal the future to those brave enough to seek it out. In Norway she is quick to punish those who dare work on her day.

Yesterday I wrote about the time that Brazil tried to replace Santa Claus with a home-grown gift-bringer named Vovo Indio. Today, you will learn about a similar attempt in Mexico.

 About the same time as Brazil’s  experiment, Mexico too was in a revolutionary mood, anxious to cast off old ways. In a similar ill-starred move, to boost nationalism and assert Mexican independence of American and Spanish cultural figures, the Minister of Education proposed replacing Santa Claus and the Three Kings with a pre-Columbian pagan deity. Children were urged to direct their Christmas hopes to the Aztec god Quetzalcóatl; merchants used the god in advertising – G.E. ran an ad boasting that whether it came from the Magi, Santa or Quetzalcóatl, there could be no gift like a General Electric refrigerator –and on 23 December 1930 the government constructed a replica of an Aztec temple in the national stadium where the Plumed Serpent himself delivered presents to a crowd of children, watched by an approving President Pascual Ortiz Rubio. Like Vovo Indio, Quetzalcóatl proved to have no popular appeal. Critics pointed out to the ruling regime that an Aztec god, half-bird, half-snake,  was as foreign to contemporary Mexican culture as Santa Claus or the Reyes Magos.

Sometimes defenders of local culture have attempted to introduce well-meaning synthetic replacements for Santa Claus, with humorous and short-lived results. In the 1930s the Brazilian government, rocked by the impact of the Great Depression and impressed by the seeming success of Mussolini’s Italian fascism, turned inward and instituted policies that emphasized national self-sufficiency. Foreign goods and foreign ideas were rejected and replaced with local production and ideology. This encouraged an abortive move to replace Papai Noel, the local version of Santa, with Vovo Indio, or “Grandfather Indian”, meant to be an alternative to Euro-American gift-bringers and thus inflate Brazilian patriotic sentiments. Instead of a fat, fur-clad saint from the chilly north, Vovo Indio was the child of a black slave and an aboriginal mother, raised by a white family, and wearing only a feather head-dress and loin-cloth. Despite political backing by the President and fascist ultra-nationalists, Vovo Indio never caught on with the children of Brazil (in fact, he was perceived as rather frightening) and he soon returned to the jungle.

In ancient Rome, ivy, Hedra helix, was a symbol of wine and merriment but was adopted by Christians as a sign of the human weakness that needs to cling to divine strength. In England it was frequently used as a greenery with which to decorate churches at Christmas, particularly in company with holly, with whom it is celebrated in song. In Scotland it was useful in divination. Young women would pluck an ivy life, hold it to their hearts and say: “Ivy, Ivy, I love you;/ In my bosom I put you,/ The first young man who speaks to me/ My future husband shall be.”

The plant, when hung in milksheds, was said to prevent souring and was also a preventative for baldness and corns. Its other medicinal uses can be read in this early-modern account:

The juice of the berries or leaves snuffed up into the nose, purges the head and brain of thin rheum that makes defluxions into the eyes and nose, and curing the ulcers and stench therein; the same dropped into the ears helps the old and running sores of them; those that are troubled with the spleen shall find much ease by continual drinking out of a cup made of Ivy, so as the drink may stand some small time therein before it be drank.

And as for ivy’s Christmas companion, holly, an English legend proclaims: “Whosoever against holly doth cry,/ In a rope shall be hung full high.” For, when the oak and ash trees babbled to the wind, and betrayed the Saviour’s hiding-place, the holly, the ivy, and the pine kept the secret hidden in their silent hearts; and for this good deed they stand green and living under winter’s icy breath, while their companions shiver naked in the blast. Not till the risen sun has danced on Easter morn shall the oak adorn a Christian household and prove itself forgiven. 

Two sorts of divination, or telling the future, were popular at Christmas: predicting the weather and discerning one’s intended spouse.

 One way of determining the weather in the year to come was based on the day of the week on which Christmas fell. Should it fall on a Sunday it meant a year of peace and good weather, a good year for sheep and beans, and the speedy capture of thieves.  Christmas Day on Monday produces a stormy and windy year; the sick will survive, although many beasts will die, and thieves be taken. Bad luck when Christmas Day falls on a Tuesday: women, sheep, lords, kings and thieves will die, yet the sick will recover. Wednesday presages a harsh winter with danger to the young and sailors. Thursday gives mixed predictions, but when when Christmas falls on a Friday, “you may sow in ashes”: i.e., crops will be so good they will spring up anywhere. Saturday’s indications are dire: “What woman that day of childe travaille / They shall bothe be in gret peraile”. Another means of weather prediction was to assign the Twelve Days of Christmas to a particular month; whatever the conditions on that day would prevail in the corresponding month. In New Zealand the Maoris say that if the pohutukawa flowers before Christmas, it will be a long hot summer; if it doesn’t, then a sultry, wet Christmas season is in store. A Scottish proverb that a “black Christmas makes a fat kirkyard” means that a snowless Christmas will result in may people dying in the coming year — a common saying all across Europe. The Romanian proverbs: “Christmas in mud, Easter in snow”; “Green Christmas brings white Easter” are similarly widespread. German farmers say: “If the crow is standing in clover at Christmas, she’ll be sitting in snow at Easter.”  A windy Christmas, however, and a calm Candlemas are signs of a good year.

There are countless ways for a young woman to determine the identity or character of her future husband. The girl might tap on the henhouse door on Christmas Eve: if a hen cackles her marital prospects are bad; cock crows are good. She might place her name and those of her friends on the bands of the ashen faggot; the first to burn through will be the first to marry. In Germany it was the custom to form a circle of girls and trust in the powers of a blinfolded goose —  the first to be touched by the bird will be the tnext to be wed. In Denmark young women could induce dreams of their future mates by reciting just before bedtime on St Lucia’s Eve:

Sweet St. Lucy, let me know

Whose cloth I shall lay,

Whose bed I shall make,

Whose child I shall bear,

Whose darling I shall be,

Whose arms I shall lie in.

St Nicholas Eve

I have hundreds of German and Austro-Hungarian Christmas cards from World War I but this is the sole example I have of one that employs St Nicholas. Though the saint was a popular gift-bringer in German-speaking Catholic territories, he seems to have had no place on such cards. It is the Christ Child (Christkindl) or a Santa Claus (der Weihnachtsmann) figure who appears as the bearer of supernatural bounty.

Accompanying St Nicholas is Krampus, a beloved figure in Austria and some neighbouring areas. Krampus is portrayed as a demon who will threaten kids with chains, switches, or a pack into which he will throw bad children. Between the two is the Christmas angel. In Hungarian and German is the wish “Merry Christmas”