A guide to all the monsters you might glimpse this Christmas

Monstrous: actors for St Nicholas and the Krampus in Austria
Monstrous: actors for St Nicholas and the Krampus in Austria - iStockphoto

“Christmas teems with monsters,” Sarah Clegg writes in The Dead of Winter, her history of lesser-known wintry traditions. Walk to a churchyard in the early hours of Christmas Eve on a Swedish Year Walk and, if you have neither eaten nor spoken, you might glimpse ghostly funeral processions for those who will die in the coming year. Krampus, the horned figure in German and Austrian folklore, accompanies Saint Nicholas through the streets whipping naughty children. Witches, the Perchta, fly through the night accompanied by a retinue of the dead; if they find chores unfinished, they split open bellies and stuff them with sawdust. For us, Christmas might be “a time we’re more likely to associate with presents”. But, in Clegg’s book, there has always been a shadowy side to festivities which take place amid the dark of winter.

To witness these customs first-hand, Clegg travels across Europe. She darts backwards and forwards through time: to Stonehenge and ancient Rome and forward to modern-day revivals. She doesn’t move sequentially through the Christmas period either. We begin on Christmas Eve with the Swedish “Year Walk”, though she transplants this to an English churchyard. Then she plunges us into Venice’s Carnival and its roots in Saturnalia, the Roman festival of harvest. Clegg attributes these meanders to “history-understanding” – knowing where the traditions came from, rather than “just” telling the stories.

I’m not sure this justification is entirely convincing. The mix of travelogue with folk stories picked from across European history occasionally flattens differences in culture and experience. What these customs might have meant to people at the time doesn’t seem to be the priority. Instead, we’re given descriptions of 21st-century enactments of old traditions. Still, these are vivid and often insightful: Clegg is especially impassioned, for example, on the modern tendency to use tradition as a pretext for racism and misogyny. At various festivities, such as the Venice Carnival, we see people wearing blackface or excluding women in the name of historical authenticity. These glints of cruelty are, perhaps, a glimpse of a Christmas monstrousness peculiarly our own.

There are unanswered questions here. Describing an encounter with a monster, she asks “Am I sure I am entirely safe?” For Clegg, imagined danger is a thrilling game, but it made me wonder whether “safety” wouldn’t have meant something different for the people who first enacted these traditions, facing winter without antibiotics, supermarkets or central heating. It seems a significant gap in the “history-understanding” of this book, to return to Clegg’s phrase, that this isn’t a more prominent question. At one point, Clegg notes of the English tradition of hoodening, in which revellers dress as misshapen horses, that “something does feel lost in the domestication of it all”. But what that “something” might be is left unsaid. And the book concludes from the comfortable, protected depths of an armchair on Christmas day.

'Mummers' players during a Twelfth Night procession on London's South Bank
‘Mummers’ players during a Twelfth Night procession on London’s South Bank - Getty

In many places, this book is fascinating. Clegg’s section on the festively gruesome Perchta alongside the persecution of witches across Europe, and the different ways this is commemorated today – whether with melancholy, or with hideous glee – is especially illuminating. But despite early promises to delve into the significance of those monsters, The Dead of Winter shies away from ascribing significance, suggesting that these traditions gave the same sort of thrills as a horror film to a modern audience. Clegg is even quite scathing of anyone who tries to find deeper meaning, saying that taking monsters too seriously was at the root of the witch hunts.

There’s a moment early in the book when she leaves the party early: the Venice Carnival proves a bit too raucous, and she slips out. I couldn’t help but feel that there was something of this shying away throughout The Dead of Winter. It has big ambitions for such a slim book, but, for all its charms and insights, there remain monsters lurking beneath its surface that are never quite brought to light.


The Dead of Winter is published by Granta at £14.99. To order your copy for £12.99, call 0330 173 0523 or visit Telegraph Books