Melanie Grace

Tag: Saga daganna (Mál og menning

  • The darkness paradox: why sanitized holidays feel hollow

    The darkness paradox: why sanitized holidays feel hollow

    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.

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    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.

  • Why Christmas needed monsters

    Why Christmas needed monsters

    Frau Perchta carries a knife.

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    She comes on the Twelfth Night, in the Alpine regions, and she checks two things. She checks whether the house is clean and she checks whether the year’s spinning is finished. If a girl has spun her whole allotted portion of flax, Perchta may leave a small silver coin in a shoe. If not, Perchta opens the girl’s belly, takes out the stomach and the guts, and packs the space with straw and pebbles.

    That is the folklore. It is not a modern embellishment and it is not something a horror movie invented. Church officials in Bavaria were condemning the cult of Fraw Percht in 1468, and Thomas Ebendorfer had condemned the same practice in Vienna in 1439, and the reason they were condemning it is that people were doing it: leaving food and drink out for her on the night she came, hoping for a good year.

    The question worth asking is not why a culture invented something so ugly. The question is what it was for.

    Start with the spinning.

    In a household economy before industrial textiles, wool and flax were not a hobby. They were the difference between having clothes and not having clothes, in a place where not having clothes in February was a way of dying. The spinning had to be done, and it had to be done by a specific date, and it had to be done by the women and girls of the house, and there was no manager, no schedule, no consequence available except the one the family could invent.

    So the family invented Perchta.

    She is not arbitrary. That is the thing everyone misses about her. She has a rule, the rule is knowable, and the rule is survivable. Finish the flax. Clean the house. Eat the fish and the gruel on her night and nothing else. Do those things and she leaves a coin. A child could hold all of that in her head. A child could act on it.

    Now look at what she replaced. Without Perchta, a girl in a Tyrolean farmhouse in 1500 still has to spin the flax, and she still freezes if she does not, and the danger is exactly as real. The difference is that the danger has no face, no name, no date, and no method. It is just the vague, unbounded dread of a world that might kill you for reasons you cannot enumerate.

    Perchta takes that formless thing and gives it a nose, a foot, a knife, and a deadline.

    This is the pattern under nearly every figure in this book. The Yule Cat eats children who did not receive new clothes for Christmas, which sounds absurd until you understand that new clothes at Christmas meant the household had done its wool work, and that a household that had not done its wool work was in genuine trouble. The Cat is the wool quota, made visible. Krampus comes with Saint Nicholas because a saint who only gives is a saint who cannot enforce anything. The Kallikantzaroi come up from below during the twelve days, when the sun is lowest and the world is at its least reliable, and they go back down when the light returns.

    None of these creatures is a decoration bolted onto a nice holiday. They are the load-bearing part. Take them out and the holiday is still standing, but it is not carrying anything.

    And that is more or less what we did. Over about a century and a half, in most of the Western world, we removed the punishing figures one by one and kept the giving ones, and we told ourselves this was progress. In some ways it plainly was. The 1821 Santa handed out a birch rod for parents to beat children with, and I am not arguing for that.

    But notice what got left behind along with the rod. The specificity. The rules a child could actually learn. The idea that Christmas is a reckoning as well as a reward, that the year is being counted, that something is owed. We kept the watching, in fact. We just took away the consequence. That is what the Elf on the Shelf is: surveillance without judgment, an eye with nothing behind it.

    Perchta had a knife. That is horrible. But Perchta also told you exactly what to do to avoid it, and if you did it, she left a coin, and that was the end of the matter until next year.

    There is a kind of mercy in a monster with rules.

    Twenty-three of them are in the book. The Kindle is available now; print lands October 1.