An Icelandic child puts a shoe on the windowsill on the night of December 12.
Americans hear this and think of stockings. It is not the same gesture. The shoe is not a container for a gift. The shoe is submitted. Something comes down from the mountain in the night and looks at it and decides. In the morning there is a small treat, or there is a rotting potato, and the potato is a verdict.
I want to make an argument about that potato, and I want to be careful about it, because the version of this argument you usually hear is not honest.
The dishonest version goes like this: children raised on scary folklore are less anxious, and here is a study. I looked for the study. I could not find one. What you find instead is a lot of people asserting it, usually citing each other. If someone has run a controlled comparison of anxiety outcomes between children raised with named monsters and children raised without, I have not located it, and I am not going to pretend otherwise in order to win a point. This book has enough true things in it that I do not need to borrow a false one.
So here is the argument without the fake evidence.
A potato in a shoe is a bounded event. It has a cause, which the child knows. It has a limit, which is that it is a potato and not a death. And it has a season, which ends. On January 6, the last of the Yule Lads goes back up the mountain, and the whole apparatus, the Lads and their mother and the Cat, packs up and leaves for eleven months. The dread has a start date and an end date and a specified escape.
Compare that to the thing we replaced it with.
The modern Christmas has no monsters, and it also has no exits. It is a season of mandatory joy, and mandatory joy is a trap, because the one thing a person cannot do on command is feel something. If you arrive at December with a dead parent, a bad year, a marriage that is ending, a diagnosis, you arrive at a holiday that has no language for you. It has only the assurance that this is the most wonderful time of the year, repeated at you in every public space, at volume, for six weeks.
The old Christmas had language for you. It had an entire cast of characters whose whole function was to say: yes, the dark is real, the dark is out there right now, the dark has a name, and here is what we do about it. The Rauhnächte, the rough nights between Christmas and Epiphany, were understood across the German-speaking Alps as the time when the boundary was thin and the dead were moving. People did not experience that as a horror show. They experienced it as accurate. It matched what December actually feels like at that latitude, when the sun clears the ridge for four hours and then gives up.
The paradox is this. A holiday that acknowledges the dark can hold more joy, not less, because the joy is not being asked to do a job it cannot do. It does not have to pretend. It does not have to be total. It only has to be the thing that happens after the Perchtenlauf comes through and drives the winter out, which is a much smaller and much more achievable claim.
Whereas a holiday that has been scrubbed of everything difficult is a holiday with nothing to push against. You cannot have relief without something to be relieved of. You cannot have the return of the light if you never admitted it was gone. That is why the sanitized version rings hollow, and it is why so many people feel obscurely bad in December and cannot say why: they are being handed the resolution of a story whose first act has been deleted.
I do not think we should bring back the belly-slitting. I want to be clear about that. Some of these traditions were cruel and the cruelty was not incidental.
But I think we threw out the frame along with the knife, and the frame was the useful part. The frame said: the year is ending, it took things from you, name them, mark them, and then let the light come back. That is not a childish thing. That is close to the oldest thing we have.
The book makes this argument twenty-three different ways, once per creature. It is on Kindle now, in print October 1.
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