The Dead of Winter

Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

Sarah Clegg

This is an unusual travel guide to the shadow side of Christmas, a fascinating romp through modern holiday celebrations and the dark history where it all began.

The book opens just before dawn on Christmas Eve. Author Sarah Clegg has wrenched herself from her warm bed to go outside. It’s dark and cold. The wind howls with so much fervor, the bells on the Christmas wreath jangle. She makes a point of telling us she hasn’t spoken to anyone since midnight. Nor has she looked into any fires. She’s ventured out on what’s called a Year Walk, a Swedish tradition that promises a walk taken before dawn — without eating, drinking, talking, or looking at a fire — will reveal ghostly representations of funerals in the coming year. You might even see your own.

Sarah Clegg has a PhD in ancient history from Cambridge University. Her research on child-murdering demons is what brought her to this chilling Christmas Eve ritual. She writes, ‘I ran into Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose, who travels house to house every Christmas… If she finds a child who hasn’t done their chores she slits open their belly, pulls out their guts, stuffs them with straw, and then sews up the wound with a ploughshare as a needle and a chain as thread. She is utterly, joyously monstrous.’

That last sentence — ‘utterly, joyously monstrous’ — encapsulates Clegg’s tone and approach to this material. The word ‘romp’ comes to mind.

Clegg spent a full winter immersing herself in the mythology and folklore of Christmas monsters. In this mashup of memoir and history, we meet, among many others, Krampus, St. Lucy, the Lord of Misrule, malevolent mummers, the Green Knight, the Icelandic Yule Cat, a not-so-nice St. Nicholas, and Italy’s striga, aka the Christmas witches.

Clegg deftly combines two kinds of research: the experiential and the academic. She attended Christmas celebrations throughout the UK and Europe, so she can tell us exactly what it was like to wander a Cotswold village with a marauding band of actors, or to be whipped by Krampus at a parade in Salzburg, Austria (complete with welts that lasted into January). She watched the sunrise with thousands of people at Stonehenge on December 22 and watched the snow fall for two days in Finland.

But she also knows her way around an archive and research library. After sharing her in-person holiday adventures to kick off each chapter, she smoothly segues into history — making the most persnickety detours into history suspenseful and exciting. This is the kind of book you want to spontaneously read aloud to friends.

Pro tip: Don’t skip the footnotes. Sprinkled throughout the book like fairy lights, they illuminate the main text and Clegg ample opportunity to throw in funny asides.

At just 200-ish pages, this short read packs a powerful holiday punch. On a scale of one to ten for holiday hijinks, it earns 15 out of 10 lashes from Krampus for snowstorms, baubles, saffron buns, boxes of chocolates, and the phrase ‘semi-benevolent monstrous Christmas women.’

I’m hurrying down a little side street just off the Grand Canal… A thick rain is falling… saturating the air until the entire shimmering city feels like it’s being slowly submerged. It’s a world of water and glittering reflections that swirl on slick stone and black canals, but I don’t have time to linger and drink it all in… I’m wearing a long black evening gown, and covering my face is a black and gold mask piled high with jewelled feathers. It’s Carnival, and I have a ball to go to. — Sarah Clegg

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