Spooky Holiday Reading: Merry Christmas, or Scary Christmas?

I'm sure you've heard the 1963 song, "It's the Most Wonderful Time of the Year." Andy Williams croons in his soothing voice,"...there'll be scary ghost stories, and tales of the glory of Christmases long, long ago." Although modern Americans tend to associate ghosts with Halloween, in Victorian England ghosts were associated with Christmas. I suppose this makes sense in some ways. After all, Christmas occurs at the darkest point of the year, which seems like a good time for ghosts to be out haunting. 

In the spirit of a spooky Christmas, here are four things you can read to get you in the holiday spirit. Two of them are even available free online, if you're feeling cash-strapped after holiday shopping. 

1. The Fright Before Christmas: Surviving Krampus and Other Yuletide Monsters by Jeff Belanger

This is the latest book by Jeff Belanger, a local author, paranormal investigator, and host of the New England Legends podcast and TV show on PBS and Amazon Prime. Full confession: the publisher sent me a copy of this book to review, and I've appeared on Jeff's podcast in the past. This is a great book for anyone interested in learning about the spooky folklore of Christmas. 

Me holding my copy of Fright Before Christmas!

I think by now most people are familiar with Krampus, the horned Austrian monster who terrorizes folks at this time of year, but Jeff also writes about many other strange Christmas creatures that are less well-known. For example, have you heard of Hans Von Trapp, the Cannibal Christmas Scarecrow of Alsace, France? Merry Christmas - but sleep with the lights on.

2. NOS4A2 by Joe Hill

The protagonist of this novel by Joe Hill (Stephen King's son) is Vic McQueen, a psychic, ass-kicking, biker mama who grows up in Haverhill, Massachusetts (my hometown). The villain is a creepy vampire named Charles Talent Manx III. Imbecilic yet cunning, child-like yet predatory, Manx travels around the country in an old Rolls Royce. 

Armed with gingerbread-scented laughing gas, Manx abducts small children and brings them to Christmasland, a creepy holiday-themed amusement park that exists just beyond the border of our reality. He and Vic battle it out in this book that will make you gasp out "Merry Christmas..." as you slip into a vampiric, gingerbread slumber.

3."The Festival" by H.P. Lovecraft (free online)

One of my favorite stories by this Rhode Island master of weird horror.  A young man visits his family's ancestral Massachusetts hometown to participate in its traditional winter solstice celebration for the first time. Although he's charmed by the town's Colonial-era architecture, he's unnerved by its residents' silent, expressionless demeanors. 

He's even more unnerved when he follows a crowd of celebrants into a church, then into its crypt, then down ancient stone steps deep into the earth... Is he really entering a subterranean realm, or just his own fetid subconscious? Either way, he discovers a fungus-filled, maggoty hellscape. You'll scream "Merry Christmas!" before losing your sanity. 

4. The Collected Ghost Stories of M.R. James by M.R. James (free online)

If "The Festival" sounds too lurid for you, may I suggest the ghost stories of M.R. James? James was an Englishman and Anglican priest who wrote ghost stories every Christmas to entertain his friends. His stories often feature bookish academics or lonely clergymen visiting old historic sites and encountering supernatural evil. 

It's all very proper and British. But while his stories are subtle and heavy on the atmosphere, they often end with shocking violence and death. Nothing says "Merry Christmas!" like an undead Satanic nobleman devouring your face. 

Enjoy your holidays, and I hope all your horrors are confined to the printed page this December.  

Christmas Chaos: Puritans, Saturnalia, and Lords of Misrule

On December 25, 1621, some young men in Plymouth, Massachusetts wanted to celebrate Christmas. Their celebration sounds pretty meager by modern standards – just playing a few ball games in the street. However, when William Bradford, Plymouth’s governor, saw what was happening he shut their little party down. He told them they shouldn't be celebrating Christmas, but he was willing to let them observe the day by praying piously indoors. They could not have any fun, however, particularly not in public.

A still from Kranky Klaus (2003), a film by Cameron Jamie.

This sounds like a Grinchy move, and it was. Unlike Governor Bradford and many other Plymouth colonists, the game-players weren’t Puritans. They hadn’t realized how strongly the Puritans hated and feared Christmas. In 1659, the Massachusetts legislature even passed a bill banning Christmas - that's how much they hated the holiday. The bill was repealed in 1681 by Sir Edmund Andros, a much-despised governor appointed by the English king, but Christmas was still not widely celebrated in Massachusetts, or New England in general, until the mid-19th century. Schools and business remained open, and churches did not hold religious services on Christmas. A few  people on the margins of New England society celebrated Christmas, but most didn't.

Puritans hated Christmas for two reasons. First, they thought it was just a pagan holiday that had become thinly Christianized. There’s probably some truth in that. The Bible does not indicate the date of Christ’s birth, so the early Church fathers decided it should be celebrated on December 25, a time when people across the Roman Empire were already celebrating various winter holidays like the Saturnalia and the birthday of Sol Invictus, the sun god. It made good political sense for the new religion to piggyback on already popular holidays.

Saturnalia by Antoine Callet

Puritans also hated Christmas because it was celebrated very differently in the 17th century than it is now. Christmas was a raucous and chaotic holiday that featured lots of drunken public revelry and social disorder. There is still some heavy drinking at Christmas these days, but in the 17th century Christmas was associated with large, drunken, disorderly mobs roaming through the streets and countryside. This can be traced back to the Roman Saturnalia, which celebrated the god Saturn, who had supposedly ruled over Earth’s Golden Age. During Saturn’s reign, everyone had been equal. There were no slaves and no masters, no kings and no subjects, no bosses and no employees. It was blissful and idyllic anarchy, with the Earth providing bountiful food so no one needed to work. These beliefs about the Golden Age were reflected in the Saturnalian celebrations holiday, with masters waiting on their slaves, men dressing as women, and much public drinking and ribaldry. All boundaries were dissolved. 

Saturnalia was a season of misrule, a time when society’s rules were temporarily inverted or suspended. It was a release valve, a way for the lower classes to temporarily let off some steam and a way for the upper classes to buy some good will. After the Roman Empire collapsed, this pattern continued in Europe through the Middle Ages and into the Renaissance, but Christmas became the holiday of misrule, not Saturnalia. In many European towns and cities, prominent lower class men were appointed the Lord of Misrule by their fellows to preside over the holiday debauchery, leading crowds that mocked priests, noblemen, and the wealthy with impudence. Carolers, often drunk and in costume, demanded food and drink at wealthy homes. Once the celebrations ended, the Lord of Misrule stepped down and the old hierarchical relationships reasserted themselves until Christmas came around again. 

Illustration from Masks of Misrule (1996) by Nigel Aldcroft Jackson

The misrule of Christmas was antithetical to the Puritan values of hard-work, moderation, and self-control, but some modern Americans have recently have shown interest in bringing back a little of the old Christmas chaos. Some contemporary witches and occultists acknowledge a Lord of Misrule in their winter solstice rituals, and the Krampus, a monstrous Yule creature associated with misrule from northern Europe, has become increasingly popular, appearing on t-shirts, tree ornaments, and in movies. Krampus celebrations are a long-standing tradition in Germany and Austria, and some Americans are trying to bring it here.

Idyllic holiday anarchy sounds like fun, but there was definitely a dark side to Christmas misrule. The threat of violence lurked beneath the surface, and vandalism sometimes occurred, even in Puritan New England. For example, a group of young men in Salem, Massachusetts harassed 72-year-old John Rowden on Christmas night in 1679. The men forcibly entered Rowden's home, caroled, and then demanded wine as payment for their performance. Rowden refused, and in retaliation the young men pelted his house with stones and branches for 90 minutes, knocked down a stone wall, and stole six pecks of apple from his cellar. Something similar happened in Deerfield, Massachusetts in 1794, when shopkeeper John Birge was awoken at 2:00 am on December 22 by a group of drunken men demanding entrance to his home. He refused, and the men broke his windows.

Perhaps if Rowden and Birge had played along, their property wouldn't have been damaged. Much like Halloween's trick-or-treat, if you gave out food, liquor or money at Christmas you and your home would escape unharmed. The threat of violent retaliation was an integral part of the holiday.

A still from Kranky Klaus (2003), a film by Cameron Jamie.

Back in 2007, I saw a short documentary by Cameron Jamie called Kranky Klaus, which follows a group of Krampuses as they roam around an Austrian town in a pre-Christmas celebration. The movie is unsettling. The Krampuses are aggressive and violent. They try to break into a pizza shop, and when a female employee stops them they push her into a snow bank. They enter a nightclub, where they knock over tables, wrestle patrons to the floor, and whip people. The Krampuses terrify a group of children, and then shove snow into pedestrians' faces in the street. No one stops them because it's a holiday tradition, but a lot of folks seem unhappy and terrified. You can watch Kranky Klaus on YouTube for yourself. What are your thoughts? Misrule and Christmas chaos sound like fun on paper, but the reality looks pretty scary.

I love weird old traditions, but I'm happy with the tamer, milder Christmas we now celebrate. The Puritan's anti-Christmas attitude wasn't defeated by misrule, but by 19th-century capitalism and a kinder, gentle approach to raising children. The prospect of happy children opening presents under a tree won out over the Puritan's "bah humbug" attitude, and over Christmas misrule as well. Feel free to celebrate Christmas (or not) as you see fit, but I'll be sitting by the tree, drinking eggnog, and listening to Mariah Carey, trying to find that happy medium between grumpy Puritan and kranky Krampus. 

*****

My favorite book about the history of Christmas is Stephen Nissenbaum's The Battle for Christmas: A Cultural History of America's Most Cherished Holiday. I got much of this post's information from it. 

In 1692, Invisible Witches Danced in Boston on Christmas Day

Christmas fast approaches, bringing with it Santa Claus, presents, eggnog and... dancing witches? 

As I mentioned in a recent post, the Puritans who colonized New England really hated Christmas. They believed it had no basis in the Bible, and disapproved of how it was celebrated with drunken carousing and public disorder. In 1659, the Puritan leaders of the Massachusetts Bay Colony even enacted a law called "Penalty for Keeping Christmas," which fined anyone who celebrated the holiday. 

The law was repealed in 1681 under pressure from the British king, but the Puritans still did not embrace Christmas. They thought it was a holiday for heretics (like Catholics and Anglicans) and for witches, who apparently, liked to celebrate Christmas with dancing. 

We know this fact about witches from A Brand Pluck'd Out of the Burning (1693), the Reverend Cotton Mather's account of the torments of Mercy Short. Short was an orphaned Boston serving girl who became tormented by invisible witches after mocking Sarah Good, an accused Salem witch being held in Boston's jail. After seeing Sarah Good and making fun of her, Short was stabbed by invisible pins, burned by unseen flames, and at times made deaf and blind. She also shouted profanities and claimed to see the Devil and witches hovering around her. Her torments lasted for many months. 

Merry Christmas?

Reverend Mather treated Short's afflictions with prayer and Bible readings, with mixed results. Groups of people would often join Mather in Short's room to witness her torments and to pray over her. No one except Short ever saw the spectral witches that allegedly assaulted her, but on Christmas Day, 1692, the following occurred:

On the twenty-fifth of December it was, that Mercy said, They (the invisible witches) were going to have a Dance; and immediately those that were attending her, most plainly Heard and Felt a Dance, as of Barefooted People, upon the Floor; whereof they are willing to make oath before any Lawful Authority. 

If I should now venture to suppose, That the Witches do sometimes come in person to do their Mischiefs, and yet have the horrible skill of clothing themselves with Invisbilities, it would seem Romantic. And yet I am inclinable to think it...

It probably seems strange to a modern reader that anyone believed evil invisible witches danced around an afflicted teenaged girl on Christmas Day, but this incident just demonstrates how much the Puritans hated Christmas. In their minds, it was literally a Satanic holiday. 

Some details about Mercy Short's life can provide more context. Prior to living in Boston, Short had lived in New Hampshire with her parents and siblings. In 1690 their family was attacked by indigenous Wabanki warriors. Short's parents and several siblings died in the raid, and Short was sold into captivity in Quebec. She was eventually freed and made her way to Boston, where she found work as a servant. 

Significantly, Mercy Short claimed the Devil looked much like a Wabanaki man. Modern psychologists who have studied her case suspect she suffered from Post Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD), which was caused by seeing her family killed. Concepts like PTSD didn't exist in 17th century Massachusetts, so she processed her anguish using the concepts she did have: Puritan theology, witchcraft, and the Devil. 

I don't want to end this on a grim note, since it's almost Christmas. So here are the positive aspects of Mercy Short's alleged witchcraft affliction. First, although she claimed some neighbors were among the invisible witches, no one was formally accused of witchcraft and no one was executed. Cotton Mather thought demons could easily impersonate a living person and therefore felt neither he nor Short could be sure if any neighbors really were afflicting her. 

Second, Short said a radiant bright spirit told her that her torments would end on March 16, 1693. And you know what? They did. Her afflictions ended as suddenly as they began. She was free from pain.

Finally, it is socially acceptable to celebrate Christmas here in New England. So take off your shoes and dance like a barefoot witch on December 25 if you want!

Meeting the Devil on Christmas Day

Ho ho ho! It's December, and Christmas madness is once again upon us. We just decorated our tree, I've had my first glass of eggnog, and I made fruitcake yesterday. Bring on the holidays. 

Christmas is so widely celebrated in modern New England that you might not believe it was once viewed as a dangerous and possibly even Satanic holiday. But it's true! The following post (which I first published in 2017) explains more...

*****

In 1662, Rebecca Greensmith of Hartford, Connecticut was arrested and charged with witchcraft. She confessed to meeting the Devil, but she denied having signed a contract with him. Well, at least she hadn't signed one at the time of her arrest. Rebecca and the Devil were waiting for a special day to sign it: Christmas.

The Reverend John Whiting of Hartford wrote the following in a letter:

But that the devil told her, that at Christmas they would have a merry meeting, and then the covenant should be drawn and subscribed. ... Mr. Stone (being then in court) with much weight and earnestness laid forth the exceeding heinousness and hazard of that dreadful sin, and therewith solemnly took notice (upon the occasion given) of the devil's loving Christmas. (quoted in David Hall's Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England.)

That sounds a little strange to modern readers. Why would the Devil love Christmas? Isn't it a holiday about hope, love and charity?

Merry Christmas?

Four-hundred years ago, Christmas was a very different holiday than it is today. It wasn't focused on family, gift-giving, and children. Instead, it was characterized by heavy drinking and public rituals that inverted the social order. Europe and its colonies were agricultural societies then, and food and alcohol were most plentiful during the late autumn and early winter. Crops had been harvested, herd animals slaughtered, and beer brewed. There was no more farm-work to be done.

In short, it was a great time to have a huge party. Wealthy people would feast themselves and their friends at home. People from the lower social classes, usually groups of young men, roamed around at night in disguise. The young men (called mummers) would usually target the homes of the wealthy, where they would perform a skit or song in return for food or beer. This is the origin of the wandering Christmas carolers so often portrayed in Christmas stories or movies. If they were denied entry or not given gifts for their performance, the mummers would retaliate with violence or by vandalizing property.

 

Some hints of this older-style Christmas can still be heard in the lyrics of Christmas carols. For example, "The  Gloucestershire Wassail" describes men threatening a butler to give them good strong beer and demanding entry to a wealthy person's home:

Come butler, come fill us a bowl of the best
Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small
Then down shall go butler, bowl and all. 

Be here any maids? I suppose here be some;
Sure they will not let young men stand on the cold stone!
Sing hey O, maids! come trole back the pin,
And the fairest maid in the house let us all in.

The lyrics of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" describe something similar:

Oh, bring us a figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us a figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us a figgy pudding and a cup of good cheer
We won't go until we get some;
We won't go until we get some;
We won't go until we get some, so bring some out here

Christmas was raucous, drunken, socially disruptive, and occasionally violent. The Puritans valued order, sobriety, and hard work. They didn't want anything to do with Christmas.

During their brief tenure ruling old England the Puritans tried to suppress Christmas celebrations. The Puritans who colonized New England did the same. It was even illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. Anyone found doing so could be fined five shillings.

Puritan ministers in New England wrote sermons against Christmas. The Reverend Increase Mather wrote the following, equating Christmas with pagan deities and Satan:

The Feast of Christ's nativity is attended with such profaneness, as that it deserve the name of Saturn's Mass, or of Bacchus his Mass, or if you will, the Devil's Mass, rather than have the holy name of Christ put upon it. (A Testimony Against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England, 1687).

Mather mentions Saturn for a very specific reason. The Bible doesn't provide a date for Christ's birth, and the early Christian church fathers decided to place it on December 25 to coincide with pagan Roman winter holidays like Saturnalia, which venerated the harvest god Saturn. This compromise between Christianity and paganism was another argument the Puritans used for hating Christmas. 

So there you have it. That's why the Puritans thought the Devil loved Christmas. Their efforts to suppress Christmas were modestly successful. Christmas wasn't widely celebrated in New England until the mid-nineteenth century. Christmas is now the biggest holiday in the United States. The Puritans would have blamed Satan, but I think it's just because people like to have fun.

*****

My favorite source for information about Puritans and Christmas is Stephen Nissenbaums's fantastic book The Battle for Christmas. It's great for anyone who wants to really understand the weird history of Christmas in America.

If you want to read more about witches, check out my new book Witches and Warlocks of Massachusetts, which is available wherever you buy books online.

Easing into the New Year with Weather Magic

I'm one of those people who really love holidays, particularly holidays where we get to do something special. Foods only eaten on special days? Decorations? Costumes? Count me in. This might be one of the reasons October, November and December are my favorite months of the year.

Often in the past I have been a little depressed when New Year's ends. It's the last of the major holidays, and once it's done it's time to take down the tree and the lights and stop eating so much gingerbread. It's also time to stop engaging in all the holiday socializing we usually do and get back to work. But this year I'm not feeling quite as depressed about the end of the holidays. Partly that's because we just didn't do any holiday socializing, except on Zoom. There's nothing to miss! I also don't miss some of our other usual holiday activities, like going to the movies or trying new restaurants, because we didn't do any of that either.

However, my New Year's attitude might also be better because I'm engaging in a little piece of folk magic: paying attention to the weather. There's an old piece of New England folklore that says the weather on the twelve days of Christmas predicts the weather for the next twelve months of the year. So I've been writing down a weather report every day since Christmas.

To be honest, I'm not entirely sure how this is supposed to work. The tradition that Christmas has twelve days dates back to 567 AD, when a council of bishops declared it a special festive season. I think there's still some confusion, though, whether the twelve days include Christmas and end on January 5, or if they start the day after Christmas and end on January 6, the Feast of Epiphany. Different churches and different regions have different rules. 

Personally, I started keeping track of the weather on Christmas Day. The weather was warm, wet and windy. Gusty winds knocked down power lines, but the temperatures were above average and most of the snow melted. So does this mean that January will be warmer than normal with heavy winds? According to the folklore it does. 

I'm not entirely convinced this is an accurate way to forecast the weather, but writing down my observations about the weather at least helps me feel more grounded. I've also been taking notes about birds and animals. They aren't technically weather, but I'm hoping they can offer some insight into what's going to happen in the coming year. For instance, I saw a black squirrel outside my house on December 25, 26 and 28. I dubbed him the Black Squirrel of Winter. Who knows what he foretells for January, February and April? Hopefully good things...

I hope 2021 has good things in store for all of us. Happy New Year!

Fat Graveyards, Hay, and Magic Cows: Folk Magic for Christmas

This is definitely shaping up to be one of the stranger Christmases in recent American history, with most of the traditional festivities being canceled due to the pandemic. So why not cozy up by the Yule log (even if its on your computer screen) and enjoy some old New England folklore about Christmas?

As a lot of you know, for many years Christmas was not celebrated in New England. The Puritans didn't believe there was any basis for it in the Bible - the date of Jesus's birth is not given, after all - and suppressed Christmas celebrations here. New Englanders began to celebrate the holiday more widely in the 19th century as the Puritan influence weakened, and all of the folklore I present to you is from the late 19th century. 

Much of it concerns the weather, since Christmas falls close to the astronomical start of winter. I'm just going to give you the grimmest piece of lore first. Let's get it over with.

 A green Christmas make for a fat graveyard. 

Ugh. That's from Fanny Bergen's 1896 book Current Superstitions. This next one comes from Clifton Johnson's What They Say in New England (1896):  

A green Christmas makes a full churchyard. The foundation for this saying is the fact that open winters with their constant freezings and thawing are very unhealthy.

I don't think there's any medical validity behind that, do you? I hope not, because with climate change we're going to get more "open winters." I'm going to chalk this one up to old time Yankees considering almost everything as an omen of death, which is true. These folklore books have a huge number of death omens. I think those sayings also demonstrate the law of inversion that shows up sometimes in folklore. A green, pleasant Christmas foretells death, or the groundhog seeing his shadow on a sunny day indicates six weeks of bad weather. Something foretells its opposite.

Here's another one from Clifton Johnson, which is less grim:

Half the pork and half the hay

On Christmas Day

Johnson notes that men used to visit their neighbors on Christmas to see how the hay and pork were holding out. It sounds very bucolic and a nice way to see folks, doesn't it? It's also practical. On Christmas there are still three more months of winter to come, so you definitely want to have enough food for your livestock and yourself. There are similar sayings about Candlemas Day on February 2.

To me, the most magical piece of Christmas folklore is the following:

There is a saying that on the night before Christmas when the clock strikes twelve the cows kneel in their stalls. Some young girls in Hadley, years ago, sat up to discover whether this was true or not. At midnight they went out to the barn, and sure enough when the hour struck the cows knelt. At any rate, that was what the girls said. (Johnson, What They Say in New England)

That story is very similar to the European belief that animals can talk at midnight on Christmas Eve. The exact origins of that legend are murky, but are probably tied to the belief that Christ was born in a stable. Some sources say God allowed the animals in the stable to speak so they could praise the newborn messiah, something they have been able to do once a year ever since. 

The New England version of the legend is a little more subdued. It's as if people wanted to believe in Christmas magic, but couldn't fully commit. "Talking cows? No way. Cows that kneel at midnight? Hmm. Well, maybe..." It's interesting that Johnson has the caveat "At any rate, that was what the girls said," as if he or his informant knew people would receive the story with skepticism.

He also includes this version of the legend:

A still older story told in town with the same theme is that at midnight when the Christmas Day begins, all the cattle in the yards and fields might be seen kneeling with their heads turned towards the east in adoration. Two girls of the olden time, who were eager to see for themselves whether this was true or not, sat up on Christmas Eve until the spellbound hour, and then visited the farm cattleyard. But the cattle made no sign that they were at all affected.

So which is it? Do the cattle kneel or not? For now, I am comfortable with the ambiguity and holding both possibilities in my mind. Please let me know if you happen to say up until midnight to see what happens. I'd be curious to know. 

Have a safe and happy Christmas!

The Festival: Christmas with H.P. Lovecraft

You might be surprised to learn that H.P. Lovecraft, Rhode Island's famous master of horror, wrote a Christmas story. "The Festival" was published in Weird Tales in 1925, and like much of Lovecraft's fiction it combines local folklore, horror tropes, and the his own personal obsessions into a weird, unnerving tale. 

The story begins with a man arriving in an old Massachusetts coastal town called Kingsport for the first time. He's also the narrator, and he tells us he's there to join a celebration that his family has kept for centuries. It's an old family tradition he's heard of but never participated in before.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their hearts it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where also they had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. 

Lovecraft was well-versed in New England colonial history, and he's probably referring to the 17th century when he mentions the "elder time when the festival was forbidden." The Puritans did not celebrate Christmas because they didn't think there was any evidence for the holiday in the Bible. In fact, Christmas was not widely celebrated in New England until the 19th century. 

The narrator's ancestors were not English Puritans, though. He claims they "they had come as dark furtive folk from opiate southern gardens of orchids, and spoken another tongue before they learnt the tongue of the blue-eyed fishers." Lovecraft was something of a racist, and you can see some of that in this description, but he may also be alluding to the fact that New England's coastal towns were often more diverse than some of the area's other English settlements. Even if they were dominated by the Puritans, coastal towns did attract sailors and merchants from all over the world. 

A portrait of H.P. Lovecraft as an 18th gentleman by Virgil Finlay.

That was definitely the case in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which inspired Lovecraft's fictional Kingsport. Marblehead is a peninsula that juts out into the Atlantic from Salem, and is difficult to get to even today. It was even harder to reach in the past. Unlike its neighbors, Marblehead was first settled not by East Anglian Puritans but by fishermen from a variety of areas. In its early years Marblehead had a reputation as a rough, unchurched town where old practices lingered. For example, some British fairy folklore was remembered in Marblehead that was not found anywhere else in Massachusetts, brought there by its original colonists. In Lovecraft's story, something even weirder is found in Kingsport.

Marblehead was one of Lovecraft's favorite places. He first visited it in December, 1922, and described it in nearly orgasmic terms as "the most powerful single emotional climax experienced during my nearly forty years of existence." He returned several more times before writing "The Festival." Lovecraft was obsessed with New England's Colonial era, and he loved Marblehead's extensive and well-preserved colonial architecture. When the narrator finally reaches Kingsport and sees it glistening on a snowy night, he is basically describing Marblehead: 

...willow-trees and graveyards; endless labyrinths of steep, narrow, crooked streets, and dizzy church-crowned central park that time durst not touch; ceaseless mazes of colonial houses piled and scattered at all levels like a child's disordered blocks; antiquity hovering on grey wings over winter-whitened gables and gambrel roofs...

It sounds very charming, right? In reality Marblehead is very charming, but since this is an H.P. Lovecraft story and not a Hallmark Christmas movie we know something sinister is lurking under the Currier and Ives scenery of Kingsport. Our narrator will encounter something much more terrifying than eggnog and fruitcake. 

One giveaway is that he is coming to meet family he has never seen before. Many of Lovecraft's stories deal with people coming to bad ends after investigating their family tree. They find out their ancestors were cannibals ("The Rats in the Walls"), albino gorillas ("Facts Concerning the Late Arthur Jermyn..."), or evil, undead, murderous wizards ("The Case of Charles Dexter Ward"). Insanity and death usually ensue. Lovecraft was very concerned with his own heritage. He was obsessed with his role in America's racial hierarchy as white man of English descent, but also keenly aware that both his parents had died in an insane asylum. Ancestry is a double-edged sword.

These issues definitely appear in "The Festival." When the narrator reaches the home of his distant relatives it is a scene right from a history book. The main room has a thick-beamed ceiling and a massive fireplace. Old books line the walls. There's even an old woman spinning at a spinning wheel. What could be more proper and New Englandy? But something seems off. His hosts don't speak and their faces are oddly waxen, like masks. Their gloved hands are unnervingly flabby. And one of the old books is the Necronomicon, a forbidden book of ancient, evil knowledge.

His hosts take it with them when they leave for the big celebration, which is probably a good sign this won't be your average holiday party. The narrator follows them into the street, and they join a throng of hooded and silent people making their way up a hill towards an old church. Oddly, whenever the narrator bumps into someone he notices their body is unusually soft and pulpy. By the way, I also forgot to mention that four of the narrator's ancestors were hanged during the Salem witch trials.

Illustration by Virgil Finally for Colour Out of Space

"The Festival" has a bizarre ending, even for an H.P. Lovecraft story. The narrator and the other celebrants make their way down an enormous secret stairway carved into the bedrock under the church, finally arriving at a huge underground cavern. It's illuminated by a pale green fire that throws no shadows, and an oily black river flows through it. 

Fainting and gasping, I looked at that unhallowed Erebus of titan toadstools, leprous fire, and slimy water, and saw the cloaked throngs forming a semicircle around the blazing pillar. It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring’s promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the Stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare.

The narrator joins in the celebration, but cannot maintain his composure when hideous winged monsters arrive to carry the hooded celebrants even further into the underworld. One of his hosts silently tries to convince him by pulling out a watch and signet ring that belonged to the narrator's great-great-great-great grandfather - which were buried with him in 1698. The host's waxen face slips off - it is a mask- revealing something so horrible the narrator throws himself into the river in terror. 

He wakes up in a hospital; the staff tell him he was pulled from the harbor. They diagnose him with 'psychosis' due to his ravings. As part of his treatment they let him read a copy of the Necronomicon, and a  passage in it leads him to believe that the people at the ritual were really long dead sorcerers and witches whose souls had created new bodies to inhabit from the worms and maggots that ate their corpses.

"Great holes secretly are digged where earth's pores ought to suffice, and things have learnt to walk that ought to crawl."

And that is the end of the story. It's one of my favorite Lovecraft stories, and if you haven't read it you can do so online here. It's Christmas but filtered through Lovecraft's various obsessions. 

Speaking of obsessions, I realized when I was almost done writing this post that I had already written about "The Festival" a few years earlier. I guess it's one of those things I return to every year. Maybe it's my new holiday tradition. Happy holidays?

The First Illustration of A Christmas Tree

My brain is fogged with eggnog but here is a very brief pre-Christmas post. 

Christmas trees have their origin in Germany, probably in the city of Strasbourg, and it seems likely that German immigrants in Pennsylvania were the first Americans to decorate Christmas trees. The earliest known drawing of an American Christmas tree is by a German-born artist named John Lewis Krimmel. Krimmel's drawing dates to 1812 or 1819, when he was touring the Pennsylvania countryside. Krimmel's drawing was not published, though, and was only discovered many years later.

The first published American illustration of a Christmas tree was this one:

From the American Antiquarian Society.

It appeared in The Stranger's Gift by Herman Bokum, which was published in Boston in 1836. Bokum was a German immigrant who taught at Harvard; the book describes his travels through America and was promoted as a book that could be given at Christmas.

Although Christmas trees originated in Germany they were actually popularized in America by New England Unitarian authors like Catharine Maria Sedgwick and Margaret Fuller. According to historian Stephen Nissenbaum, these writers felt that ceremonial gift-giving around the Christmas tree could teach children patience and charity. Fuller, Sedgwick and other reform-minded writers were very popular in the early 19th century and their stories about Christmas trees were read by thousands. 

Fast forward two-hundred years, and Christmas trees are now a ubiquitous part of the holiday in America. Are patient and charitable children? Only Santa Claus knows for sure... Enjoy your holiday!

A Christmas Elf (or Alien?) Sighting in the New Hampshire Woods

Well, it's the Christmas season, which is one of the few times in the year when we are allowed to believe in all sorts of strange things. Flying reindeer? Check. Large man with a sack who sneaks into your house at night but doesn't steal things? Check.

Christmas elves? Check. Lots of people (mostly children) believe that Santa Claus is helped in his yearly labors by a gaggle of elves who live at the North Pole. This is mostly taken on faith, since I don't think there have been many Christmas elf sightings reported around the world. However, one may have been seen in the wintry woods of Derry, New Hampshire on December 15, 1956.

That was the day that Alfred Horne was out alone in the forest, chopping down Christmas trees for the impending Yuletide holiday. As you all know, weird things can happen when you're out in the woods by yourself in any season, but late fall and early winter are prime times for weirdness. The days are short, the sun is low in the sky, and those entities that like the darkness are more likely to make an appearance.

After a while Horne he realized that he was not alone. There was someone (or perhaps something?) standing nearby watching him as he worked. The entity was about two feet high. It had a large head with big floppy ears. In place of a nose it just had two nostril slits, and its eyes were covered with nictitating membranes like a snake's. To make things even stranger, the entity was bright green, stark naked, and had stumpy arms and toeless feet.

Photo from Tumblr (and ultimately Henrik Vind).

Horne watched the entity for twenty minutes. In turn, the entity watched Horne. Finally, Horne decided to capture it. He realized that no one would believe him unless he had the little green humanoid as proof. But as he tried to grab the entity it emitted loud, blood-curdling shrieks. Horne fled from the woods in panic, leaving the little green man behind.

What exactly was this entity? Because it was seen ten days before Christmas, and Horne was out chopping down Christmas trees, I like to think it was a renegade Christmas elf. Perhaps it had wandered down from the North Pole and got lost in the New Hampshire woods, as so many hikers still do.

Alfred Horne seemed to think the creature was an extraterrestrial of some kind. After fleeing the woods that December day Horne didn't tell anyone about the creature until six years later, when he wrote several letters to the astronomer and UFO investigator Walter Webb. The story has appeared in several publications and books since then, including Joseph Citro's Passing Strange, which is where I first read it. 

I still think the little green man could have been an elf, though. For one thing, the line between extraterrestrials and fairy-folk is blurry (at least in my opinion). They both tend to be small, they both often have disproportionately large heads, and they both like to abduct people. But more importantly, Derry, New Hampshire has a tradition of fairy folklore. The town was settled by Scotch-Irish immigrants and they seem to have brought their fairy lore to America with them. Written legends about a "Derry Fairy" date back to the early 20th century. Descriptions of the fairy are vague - in some stories she is a beautiful lake-dwelling fairy queen named Tsienneto, but in other stories a wizened, wrinkled wood nymph appears. So perhaps Horne's little green man was actually a little green woman?

I don't think the strange little entity has been seen again since that day in 1956, but maybe if you stay awake on Christmas Eve this year you might find out Santa's little helpers have eyes like snakes and green skin. Make sure to leave out extra milk and cookies just in case. 

On The Road: Troll Legends in Iceland

Last week I went beyond my usual New England focus to write about elf-lore in Iceland, which I had recently visited. Please indulge me one more time, as I discuss Icelandic trolls. Next week I'm back to my usual Yankee stomping grounds. 

As we drove around Iceland our tour guides mentioned trolls several times. Although they never really described what a troll looked like, they did tell us that they are quite large and like to eat human flesh. How large? Well, a hundred feet tall in some cases. For example, this rock formation on the Snaefellsnes peninsula was said to be formed when two trolls were fishing in their boat late at night. 

Icelandic trolls come in two varieties: day trolls (who are active when the sun is up), and night trolls, who are active only after sunset. The winter nights are very, very long in Iceland so I am sure the night trolls appreciate all that darkness. According to legend, two night trolls set out in their ship to go fishing off the Snaefellsnes peninsula. They were so engrossed in their work that they didn't realize how long they had been out to sea. As the sun started to rise they raced back to shore, hoping to reach the shelter of their cave before the sun's rays hit them. Unfortunately they were not fast enough. When the sun rose the two trolls (and their boat) were turned into stone. 

This rock formation does look like two people in a boat so I can understand how the legend arose. But what is also interesting is that these rocks are really, really big. That means that trolls are really, really big. Scarily big. 

Elsewhere in Iceland I also heard the legend about the fishing trolls used to explain a different coastal rock formation near Vik. Perhaps being caught by the sun was a common problem for trolls who went out fishing. I have also read that the Snaefellsnes rock formation was not fishermen, but were actually two troll lovers who stayed out too late canoodling and were petrified at sunrise. 

Three trolls from The Hobbit (1977)

J.R.R Tolkien was fascinated by Icelandic folklore and he used quite a bit of it in his novels. When I heard these troll stories I was of course reminded of the three trolls that Bilbo and the dwarves encounter in The Hobbit. Although not as large as the trolls of Iceland, they are indeed turned to stone when they are caught outside at sunrise. 

Gryla (2009) by Icelandic painter Thrandur Thoraarinnson

Many troll stories are closely tied to rock formations in the Icelandic landscape. But not all the trolls have been turned to stone. Some are still active, including a particularly dangerous troll named Gryla. Gryla has a fondness for the flesh of human children, particularly those who disobey their parents. Perhaps disobedient flesh tastes sweeter than obedient flesh? Gryla is particularly active around Christmas, when she roams Iceland with a sack to put all the naughty children in. Gryla does not seem to be as large as some trolls and can easily sneak into the average home to grab a child. 

Yule Lad figurines I saw in a gift shop.

Gryla has thirteen sons, who are known as the Yule Lads. They are active during the thirteen days leading up to Christmas, when they take turns visiting homes by night to cause trouble. Each Yule Lad takes one night, and their names indicate the mischief that can be anticipated on particular nights. Door-Slammer slams doors to wake people up, Sausage-Swiper steals sausages, Window-Peeper looks in windows, and Meat-Hook steals meat using a hook (and also has the most terrifying name). The Yule Lads have been somewhat rehabilitated these days, and are said to bring gifts to good children. They leave rotten potatoes for those who are bad. In essence, Gryla and her sons fill the same role that Santa Claus fills here in the United States: rewarding good children and punishing those who are naughty (although Santa doesn't eat anyone).

The path into Dimmuborgir.

The Yule Lads' cave.

Although the Yule Lads are not petrified in stone, they are still associated with a specific rock formation in Iceland. The Yule Lads make their home at Dimmuborgir, an ancient collapsed lava tube in northern Iceland near Lake Myvatn. The name Dimmuborgir means "dark castles," which I think does an accurate job describing these weird black lava formations. It is a labyrinthine place and would be easy to get lost in were it not for the helpful trails that have been laid down. It is a very popular tourist attraction, but apparently the Yule Lads don't mind the company. One particular cave is even identified as the Yule Lads' home, but when I visited they were not in. Perhaps this was for the best. I wouldn't want to be punished with a rotten potato!

Next week I'm back to writing about New England, but it was interesting to visit another country and compare folklore. Although elves and trolls don't figure prominently in New England folklore, I could see similarities. Geologically New England is much older than Iceland, but we still have lots of legends explaining our strange random rock formations. Our legends usually feature the Devil, or witches, but that's to be expected given this region's history. It's good to go away, but it's also good to come back to weird creepy stuff I know and love. 

Weird and Wonderful Folklore from 2017

I have been celebrating Christmas in the old-fashioned way: eating too much, sleeping a lot, and spending time with family and friends. I hope your holiday season has also been a good one!

I had a lot of fun blogging this year, and I hope you enjoyed reading my ramblings. In case you missed any of these, here is a list of the top five most popular posts in 2017 here on New England Folklore.

Number One: Why The Devil Loves Christmas

In a season filled with twinkly lights, eggnog lattes and holiday sweaters, sometimes it's nice to remember that Christmas hasn't always been about sweetness and familial love. It used to be a drunken party that lasted for weeks where the poor harassed the wealthy for gifts and everyone ate and drank way too much. That last part hasn't really changed much, but the attitude of our nation's religious leaders towards Christmas certainly has. They used to hate the holiday and claimed it was the Devil's work. Now they're demanding we all go around saying "Merry Christmas."

Number Two: Bradford College: The Necronomicon, Strange Lights, and Ghosts

I grew up in Haverhill, Massachusetts, the city where Bradford College is located. Sadly I was unaware the Necronomicon, that legendary book of evil magic, is supposed to be hidden in a tunnel under the campus. If I had been my high school career would have been much more interesting. There are lots of classic ghost stories about Bradford, but this post also incorporated the personal experiences of someone who went to school here. Those experiences were particularly strange and and quite creepy.

Number Three: Apple Lore: Love, Death and Magic

I live near a farmer's market that sells a really great selection of apples in the fall. Who doesn't love to bite into a crisp, recently picked apple? But there's more to apples than cider and pie. There's also a lot of folklore. Some of it is spooky, like tales of corpse-eating apple trees and bloody apples that reveal the identity of a murderer. Some of it is charming, like using an apple peel to find your true love. And some of it is both spooky and charming, like the best folklore often is.

Number Four: Milton's Ghost Road 

Milton is a rural suburb just south of Boston, but one short stretch of road there has a really bad reputation. There are so many ghost stories about Harland Street that it's earned the nickname Ghost Road. Is it just that Harland Street runs through some dark swampy woods, or are there really a variety of spirits haunting it? People claim to have seen a family of ghosts, a man with no face, and a phantom car. Psychic investigators encountered glowing blobs of energy back in the early 1980s, so perhaps there really is something lurking on Ghost Road.

Number Five: Wild Men in The Woods: Strange Creatures Seen in Haverhill, Massachusetts

My hometown made it into the top five list twice. Just as I didn't know the Necronomicon was buried in Haverhill, I was also unaware that several wild men had been sighted there in the 19th and early 20th centuries. What were these mysterious creatures? Were they disturbed individuals living in the woods, primitive ape men, or something else entirely? Witnesses described a 1909 wild man as "very lightly clad" so perhaps he was just a nudist caught sunbathing. Whatever they were, legends about wild men just demonstrate that our backyards can be strange and wonderful places.

Have a great New Year's Eve and stay tuned for more weird New England Folklore in 2018!

A Lovecraft Christmas: Fact and Fiction in "The Festival"

Christmas is a holiday about love, hope and charity. Trees are decorated with lights. Parents bake cookies with their kids. Everyone gets excited about Santa's big visit. It's really great, but if all the sweetness and joy is too much for you I suggest reading H. P. Lovecraft's 1923 story "The Festival" This morbid tale of an old-fashioned New England Christmas is full of horror, ancient secrets, and giant maggots. And like much of Lovecraft's work, there's a nugget of truth in it.

You can read "The Festival" here, but if you want to save your sanity I'll summarize. It begins on Christmas Eve with a man visiting Kingsport, an old Massachusetts fishing town that is his family's ancestral home. He has never been there before.

It was the Yuletide, that men call Christmas though they know in their heads it is older than Bethlehem and Babylon, older than Memphis and mankind. It was the Yuletide, and I had come at last to the ancient sea town where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden; where they also had commanded their sons to keep festival once every century, that the memory of primal secrets might not be forgotten. (H.P. Lovecraft, "The Festival")

At first the narrator is charmed by the old colonial buildings and narrow, crooked streets of Kingsport. But he is also a little creeped out as he walks through town. There are no people around, or even footprints in the snow, and all the curtains are drawn in the windows. He gets even more creeped out when he arrives at the really, really old house where his distant relatives live.

Inside is an elderly mute man wearing a hooded robe and gloves, while an elderly woman works without speaking at a a spinning wheel by the fire. There may also be someone sitting in a high-backed chair facing the window. Oh, and the elderly couple's faces may be waxen masks...

H.P. Lovecraft (1890 - 1937)

The elderly couple welcome the narrator, who browses the couple's book collection while he waits for the family Yule festival to start. Most of their books are about demonology and witchcraft, and they have a copy of The Necronomicon, a book of unspeakably blasphemous knowledge. Just the usual light holiday reading. As the narrator reads the unseen guest in the chair exits unseen - through the window - with an odd noise. Creepy.

Eventually the elderly couple indicates it is time for the festivities. As they and the narrator walk through the streets towards an old church they are joined by other Kingsport citizens, also hooded and robed. Here is Lovecraft's description of people walking to church on Christmas Eve:

...cowled, cloaked figures that poured endlessly from every doorway and formed monstrous processions up this street and that, past the creaking signs and antediluvian gables, the thatched roofs and diamond-paned windows; threading precipitous lanes where decaying houses overlapped and crumbled together; gliding across open courts and churchyards where the bobbing lanthorns made eldritch drunken constellations.

Once inside the church the throng descends a staircase that spirals down through the earth. Down, down they go until they eventually reach a vast cave. The cave is illuminated by a "belching column of sick greenish flame," allowing the narrator to see they are on the banks of a river feeding into a dark subterranean sea. At this point the actual Yule ritual begins:

It was the Yule-rite, older than man and fated to survive him; the primal rite of the solstice and of spring's promise beyond the snows; the rite of fire and evergreen, light and music. And in the Stygian grotto I saw them do the rite, and adore the sick pillar of of flame, and throw into the water handfuls gouged out of the viscous vegetation which glittered green in the chlorotic glare.

Until this point the narrator has maintained some modicum of composure, but he loses it when the celebrants mount hideous flying monsters that carry them off over the subterranean sea. As the elderly mute man encourages the narrator to mount one too it becomes clear that he is indeed wearing a mask and may not be human. In a panic the narrator hurls himself into the river.

The narrator awakens to find himself in a hospital; the authorities claim he was found floating in the harbor. They commit him to a nearby insane asylum, where they staff helpfully procure a copy of The Necronomicon for him to read. The narrator ponders a passage hinting that dead sorcerers can project their minds into the maggots that eat their bodies in the grave and then cause them to grow to human size. Were the elderly couple and the other celebrants really giant maggot-beings possessed by the minds of undead sorcerers? Merry Christmas!

I will confess I kind of love "The Festival," mainly because it is so fabulously weird but also because it has a nugget of truth in it. And I don't just mean the psychological truth that spending the holidays with family can be hard for some people. I mean some historical truth about coastal New England.

Lovecraft was inspired to write "The Festival" after visiting the Massachusetts town of Marblehead in December of 1922. He was delighted at the town's extensive Colonial-era architecture, and the narrator's walk through fictional Kingsport incorporates many of the sights Lovecraft saw. For example the elderly couple's house was probably inspired by one on Marblehead's Mugford Street, and the church was based on St. Michael's Church on Frog Lane, which is one of the oldest Episcopal churches in New England.

Mugford Street in Marblehead

As you probably know, Massachusetts was mostly colonized by Puritans, but non-Puritans settled here as well, particularly in the fishing towns like Marblehead. The Puritans tended to be farmers and craftspeople from East Anglia, but the fisherfolk who settled in Marblehead were more religiously and ethnically heterogeneous. The town had a reputation in its early years for being rough and a little bit wild. It was a place for hard-drinkers and outsiders. And it was also a place where people celebrated Christmas.

As I wrote last week, the Puritans despised the revelry of Christmas and tried to ban it from New England. They were not successful at tamping down the celebrations in Marblehead, though, and in 1729 Michael Pigot, the pastor of St. Michael's, held a service celebrating Christmas. The local Puritans were outraged, and preached a sermon against the holiday in response. Reverend Pigot responded in turn by publishing a pamphlet titled A vindication of the practice of the antient Christian, as well as the Church of England, and other reformed churches, in the observation of Christmas-Day : in answer to the uncharitable reflections of Thomas de Laune, Mr. Whiston, and Mr. John Barnard of Marblehead: in a sermon preach'd on the 4th. of January, 1729--30. That's a real mouthful of a title! Angry mobs from both groups confronted each other in the streets.

In "The Festival", Lovecraft writes that Kingsport is "where my people had dwelt and kept festival in the elder time when festival was forbidden." Is this an oblique reference to the actual controversy in Marblehead over Christmas? I think it's possible. Lovecraft was a Colonial history buff and loved incorporating historical facts into his story. It's likely he knew the history of the town before he wrote the story. Let's just hope the giant maggot monsters aren't real too.

Why The Devil Loves Christmas

In 1662, Rebecca Greensmith of Hartford, Connecticut was arrested and charged with witchcraft. She confessed to meeting the Devil, but she denied having signed a contract with him. Well, at least she hadn't signed one at the time of her arrest. Rebecca and the Devil were waiting for a special day to sign it: Christmas.

The Reverend John Whiting of Hartford wrote the following in a letter:

But that the devil told her, that at Christmas they would have a merry meeting, and then the covenant should be drawn and subscribed. ... Mr. Stone (being then in court) with much weight and earnestness laid forth the exceeding heinousness and hazard of that dreadful sin, and therewith solemnly took notice (upon the occasion given) of the devil's loving Christmas. (quoted in David Hall's Witch-Hunting in Seventeenth-Century New England.)

That sounds a little strange to modern readers. Why would the Devil love Christmas? Isn't it a holiday about hope, love and charity?

Merry Christmas?

Four-hundred years ago, Christmas was a very different holiday than it is today. It wasn't focused on family, gift-giving, and children. Instead, it was characterized by heavy drinking and public rituals that inverted the social order. Europe and its colonies were agricultural societies then, and food and alcohol were most plentiful during the late autumn and early winter. Crops had been harvested, herd animals slaughtered, and beer brewed. There was no more farm-work to be done.

In short, it was a great time to have a huge party. Wealthy people would feast themselves and their friends at home. People from the lower social classes, usually groups of young men, roamed around at night in disguise. The young men (called mummers) would usually target the homes of the wealthy, where they would perform a skit or song in return for food or beer. This is the origin of the wandering Christmas carolers so often portrayed in Christmas stories or movies. If they were denied entry or not given gifts for their performance, the mummers would retaliate with violence or by vandalizing property.

 

Some hints of this older-style Christmas can still be heard in the lyrics of Christmas carols. For example, "The  Gloucestershire Wassail" describes men threatening a butler to give them good strong beer and demanding entry to a wealthy person's home:

Come butler, come fill us a bowl of the best
Then we hope that your soul in heaven may rest
But if you do draw us a bowl of the small
Then down shall go butler, bowl and all. 

Be here any maids? I suppose here be some;
Sure they will not let young men stand on the cold stone!
Sing hey O, maids! come trole back the pin,
And the fairest maid in the house let us all in.

The lyrics of "We Wish You A Merry Christmas" describe something similar:

Oh, bring us a figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us a figgy pudding;
Oh, bring us a figgy pudding and a cup of good cheer
We won't go until we get some;
We won't go until we get some;
We won't go until we get some, so bring some out here

Christmas was raucous, drunken, socially disruptive, and occasionally violent. The Puritans valued order, sobriety, and hard work. They didn't want anything to do with Christmas.

During their brief tenure ruling old England the Puritans tried to suppress Christmas celebrations. The Puritans who colonized New England did the same. It was even illegal to celebrate Christmas in Massachusetts between 1659 and 1681. Anyone found doing so could be fined five shillings.

Puritan ministers in New England wrote sermons against Christmas. The Reverend Increase Mather wrote the following, equating Christmas with pagan deities and Satan:

The Feast of Christ's nativity is attended with such profaneness, as that it deserve the name of Saturn's Mass, or of Bacchus his Mass, or if you will, the Devil's Mass, rather than have the holiday name of Christ put upon it. (A Testimony Against Several Prophane and Superstitious Customs, Now Practiced by Some in New-England, 1687).

Mather mentions Saturn for a very specific reason. The Bible doesn't provide a date for Christ's birth, and the early Christian church fathers decided to place it on December 25 to coincide with pagan Roman winter holidays like Saturnalia, which venerated the harvest god Saturn. This compromise between Christianity and paganism was another argument the Puritans used for hating Christmas.

So there you have it. That's why the Puritans thought the Devil loved Christmas. Their efforts to suppress Christmas were modestly successful. Christmas wasn't widely celebrated in New England until the mid-nineteenth century. Christmas is now the biggest holiday in the United States. The Puritans would have blamed Satan, but I think it's just because people like to have fun.

*****

My favorite source for information about Puritans and Christmas is Stephen Nissenbaums's fantastic book The Battle for Christmas. It's great for anyone who wants to really understand the weird history of Christmas in America.