The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year (3 page)

Later, Kay spots the “queen bee” herself as she alights on the rim of an empty flowerpot as “a lady dressed in the finest white crape . . . composed of millions of starlike particles.”

Although there was no Frau Berchta afoot in Anders-

en’s Denmark, the writer had traveled extensively through

Europe, including the Alpine hinterlands where Berchta’s

larger servants still come to collect tribute for their Queen Bee, as they call her. Though the “queen” herself is nowhere in sight, her servants present themselves dutifully at the
12 A Thousand Years of Winter

farmer’s gate in grotesquely carved wooden masks. They

remind the farmer that it is Frau Berchta who blankets the fields in snow so the soil can rest and yield generous crops next year. The farmer had better make an offering to these worker bees if he wants them to come back and dance in

the fields at the close of winter and bless the furrows.

On Berchtl Nights, the goddess’ Austrian servants take

to the streets and create a din by ringing cowbells and playing tuneless music on their fiddles. These activities were not always confined to Advent Thursdays or to Austria. A

fortnight before St. Andrew’s Day (November 30) 1572,

one Hans Buchmann claimed that he had been transported

by supernatural agency from the forest near Rothenburg,

Germany, to Milan, Italy. When he was first set upon, he

thought he was under attack by a swarm of bees, but the

buzzing then resolved itself into a terrifying scraping of bows on fiddle strings. We don’t know what really happened to Hans—just before his disappearance he had borrowed

some money without asking, so he had plenty of reason to

fabricate the tale—but it is interesting that he should have thought to mention how the buzzing of bees had preceded

his being lifted up and carried over the treetops. After that, he had to make his own way back to Rothenburg, finally

arriving on Candlemas (February 2).

In the Alps of the same century, a visit from the
Salige
Lütt
(“Blessed Host”) or
Salige Fräuleins
(“Blessed Young Ladies”) who came at night to sample food offerings left

on the table, was announced by a softer bee-like music than the one Hans Buchmann heard. This Blessed Host would

eventually make themselves over as the Christ Child’s ret-

A Thousand Years of Winter 13

inue and replace the humming with the tinkling of a tiny

clapper bell. Still, wherever Berchta is remembered under

her own name we can expect to hear buzzing strings or at

least some allusion to bees.

A Bird’s Eye View

Also running amok was Berchta’s more northerly incar-

nation, Frau Holle, who used to take charge of all infants who died before they could be baptized. The stubbled fields over which the broomstick-mounted Frau Holle and her

adopted children flew at Christmastime would be espe-

cially bountiful at the next harvest, but if you looked up at the flight of spirits as they passed overhead, you would be struck blind. Frau Holle eventually lost her sacred season in the north, but, thanks to the Brothers Grimm, she is remembered in fairy tale.

Frau Holle is the stereotypical German
Hausfrau
. The snow is the goose down that swirls into the sky when she

shakes out her voluminous featherbed, the fog is the steam wafting up from the pots on her stove, and the thunder is

the turning of her flax reel. Frau Holle was always look-

ing for good help. To apply for the maid’s position in her house, you first had to pass through water, either the pool in which she bathed to make herself young again, or an

ordinary well.

In the Grimms’ fairytale, “Frau Holle,” an industrious

though apparently clumsy girl drops her spindle down a

well. Naturally, she goes in after it, emerging in a wonderful land full of flowers and sunshine. She wanders aimlessly, helping out a loaf of bread about to burn and a drooping

14 A Thousand Years of Winter

apple tree along the way. Finally arriving at a cottage, she is greeted by a long-toothed old woman who introduces

herself as Frau Holle and offers her a place in the house-

hold. The girl stays on to cook, clean and help shake out the featherbeds, until she grows homesick. Frau Holle releases her without complaint, showering her with gold coins as

she steps out the door.

Later, the girl’s lazy stepsister dives down into the

same well to see what
she
can get out of the old woman.

She ignores both the imperiled loaf of bread and the apple tree, and when she gets to the cottage, she does little more than trail her fingers over the dusty furniture and swat half-heartedly at the bedclothes. When she announces that she is quitting, she gets a bucket of pitch dumped over her head.

While the German Frau Holle has been known to let

herself go, her lack of youthful bloom is nothing com-

pared to the horror that is Perchta. The Alpine Perchta is the image of Frau Holle as it might appear in that devilish, distorting mirror with which Andersen opens “The Snow

Queen.” The name Perchta dates back to the fourteenth

century, while the first written reference to a horrible witch who presided over the winter festivities comes from Sal-zburg in the tenth. Who knows how long she might have

been around before that? Of course, she may not always

have gone by the name of Perchta; Jacob Grimm offers

us the possibility that her name may have come from Old

High German
Giperahta Nahta
, or “shining night,” that is, Epiphany (January 6), the night on which the Star shone

down on Bethlehem. The fact that the old witch still has her own
Perchtentag
or “Perchta’s Day” on January 6, and that
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she is celebrated through all the Twelve Days of Christmas with the
Perchtenlauf
or “Running of Perchta’s servants,” is a major accomplishment.

Yes, Perchta does have a pretty side which is embodied

by the “Pretty Perchten” who array themselves in flowery,

cone-shaped headdresses, but most of her votaries appear

as hairy, horned monsters, their huge mouths carved into

grimaces. These “Evil Perchten” are not just ugly, but rowdy too. One of their jobs is to climb up on the village rooftops and drop snowballs down the chimneys.

How has Perchta managed to last so long? Certainly not

by being pretty or nice. One of the secrets of her longev-

ity may be her willingness to poke her long nose into other people’s business, as we will see her doing on St. Barbara’s and St. Lucy’s Eve in Chapter Nine. Since the fifteenth century at least, Perchta has been portrayed with an inhumanly long nose. Sometimes described as “iron-nosed,” her Austrian nickname,
Schnabelpercht
, “Beak Perchta,” is more apt.

Perchta was also supposed to have one splayed foot, osten-

sibly from pressing the treadle of her spinning wheel, but more likely to have been a goose or swan’s foot. These avian vestiges, along with the white feathers which Frau Holle

caused to fall from the sky, suggest that Perchta was used to assuming the shape of a bird, an ancient habit of Germanic goddesses like Frigga and Freya.

House Calls

Another strategy for holding on to power is to keep a close eye on one’s subjects. Accordingly, the irrepressible old

hag used to visit homes personally on the Eve of Epiphany

16 A Thousand Years of Winter

(January 5). If she liked what she found, the German Ber-

chta might leave a gift of her own sky-spun yarn as a token of her approval. If this Yuletide goddess didn’t like what she saw, then you had better beware. When she stepped over the threshold, she might be carrying a bundle of twigs, straw or brushwood in one of her withered claws. Was she thinking

of doing a little extra sweeping with that bundle of twigs?

Or had she brought kindling for the fire? She might also be holding a brick, so perhaps she’d come to fix that chink in the garden wall? Unfortunately, it was none of the above.

Once she’d run her talon over the tops of the cupboards

and counted the full spools of thread, the old biddy would want to know what you had made for supper and whether

or not you remembered to put a little aside for her. She had better not smell any meat through that long beak of a nose, because the Eve of Epiphany meant a brief re-institution of the penitential fast that preceded Christmas. On this night, as the initials of the Three Kings were being chalked upon the lintel, the only permissible foods were fish and starch.

Oatmeal with a little smoked herring on the side was one

way to go, as was a thin pancake made of only flour and

milk. Dumplings were a tastier solution. In the Thuringian forest of central Germany, Frau Holle was credited with

the original potato dumpling recipe from which all others

descend, while in Braunschweig to the north, she insisted

only that no beans be eaten during the Twelve Days of

Christmas.

But what if you forgot and went out for beer and sau-

sages just before the old lady arrived? Or if you cooked the right dishes but forgot to leave an extra portion warming

A Thousand Years of Winter 17

on the stove? The consequences would not be quite the

same as if you had neglected to put out cookies for Santa, for Frau Berchta would be really, horribly upset. First, she would slit open your belly with the knife she kept hidden

in her skirts. Then she would reach in and pull out all that forbidden food, replacing it with the bundle of kindling—

or that brick—before she sewed you up again using farm

implements instead of surgical instruments. She wouldn’t

do any of this right away but would wait until you were

sleeping.

In the Icelandic
Laxdaela Saga
, An the Black, smith to Olaf Hoskuldsson, undergoes the same procedure not once

but twice. In Chapter 48, An dreams that a hag is standing over him with a meat cleaver and a wooden trough. Without a word, she cuts him open, scoops out his entrails and stuffs him full of twigs. Was it something he ate? Scrooge might have said so, for did he not try to dismiss Marley’s ghost as “an undigested bit of beef, a blot of mustard, a

crumb of cheese, a fragment of underdone potato”? When

An relates his experience at breakfast the next morning, the other men tease him, but his hostess interprets the vision as a warning.

Sure enough, in the next chapter, An and his traveling

companions are engaged in a prolonged sword fight with

the men of Laugar. By the time the fight is over, An’s entrails are spilling out for real. He is presumed dead and laid out accordingly. But that night, he sits up suddenly in the candlelight, startling those who are keeping watch over his body.

An assures them he was never really dead, only dreaming.

The same strange woman had returned, extracted the load of
18 A Thousand Years of Winter

kindling and put his own bits back again. The smith makes

a full recovery and is known as An Twig-belly forever after, or at least until Chapter 55 when he gets his head split open while avenging the death of Kjartan Olafsson. Some wounds

a witch just can’t fix.

So if a knife-wielding Berchta appears to you on the

heels of some overindulgence, know that she is not really

stealing your gastrointestinal tract; she’s just keeping it safe until you learn to make more intelligent choices.

The Lady of the Castle

In Switzerland, a “White Lady” who appears to be a glam-

orized version of the Spinnstubenfrau, and who was in fact known as “Bertha,” was attached to a tenth-century castle tower on the shores of Lake Geneva. A White Lady is

a tutelary spirit who takes it upon herself to guard trea-

sures, announce impending deaths in a noble family and

even comfort the children. Each Christmas Eve, this Ber-

tha materialized out of the fog dressed in a glowing white dress and carrying a scepter which at one time must have

been a distaff, for she was especially interested in whether or not the girls had finished their spinning. In addition to inspecting the nearby households, she scattered handfuls of grain as she went. Like all queens, she never traveled alone but was trailed by an assortment of dwarves, kobolds and

other child-sized spirits as she set off from the foundations of her tower.

According to some accounts, this Bertha was the ghost

of a historical queen, possibly a Swabian princess who married King Rudolph in 922. Others claim she was the mother

A Thousand Years of Winter 19

or grandmother of Charlemagne. Whoever she might

have been, the Swiss Bertha eventually outgrew her origi-

nal identity. In time, she became even too big for the White Lady’s boots, for her distaff and Yuletide appearance—

not to mention that bird’s foot she kept hidden inside the sparkling hem of her gown—all marked her as yet another

incarnation of the queen of the gods.

All in all, this Bertha’s was a very different sort of haunting from that carried out by another famous queen and

Christmas ghost, Anne Boleyn, who used to appear in a

white dress among the trees of the park outside her child-

hood home of Rochford Hall during the Twelve Days of

Christmas. Because she had no special association with

the later residents of Rochford Hall, except to terrify them, Anne cannot be counted as a proper White Lady. Besides,

White Ladyhood requires a certain stick-to-itiveness which Anne’s ghost lacked: during the same season in which she

haunted Rochford in Essex, she was known to pop over,

headless, to Hever Castle in Kent.