Good overview of some of the old traditions, Christmas, Krampus, and how they came to be.
Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose, who travels house to house every Christmas leading a cavalcade of the dead. 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.
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Krampus, a hideous towering demon with enormous horns who beats children with a switch or steals them away.
In Iceland, there's Grýla, an ogress who comes down from the mountains at Christmas and is inclined to eat her victims, popping them into a giant stew while her murderous cat - the Yule Cat - prowls at her side. InFrance, there's Père Fouettard - Father Whipper - a butcher who had kidnapped, murdered and tried to pickle three young boys, before he was stopped by St Nicholas. As punishment, according to the legend, he was forced to accompany St Nicholas for the rest of eternity, a looming figure lurking behind the saint, whipping children who don't deserve St Nicholass presents.
Saturnalia - a king of Saturnalia, and everyone had to obey him/her. slaves were served, and allowed to 'speak freely'
A century and a half before Christ, the Romans had moved their New Year's celebrations from March to January (the vestiges of the older New Year are still visible in September, October, November and December, which were - as their names suggest - the seventh, eight, ninth and tenth months when the year began in March) the date when new consuls took office. The festivities originally associated with this festival - called Kalends - were about as exciting as you'd expected for a celebration centred on politicians assuming power.
It's not a coincedence that the word for a Carnival mask - 'larva' - also translates as 'ghost'.
There are other monsters in the Marshfield mumming besides the murderous king and the Devil. After all, while the costumes gesture vaguely towards the characters - William wears a paper crown, Father Christmas is all in red - the main purpose of the outfits seem to be to entirely disguise the players, making them unrecognisable as people and giving them the uncanny impression of being monsters who have decided to put on a performance. This is because the play came second, laid over an older tradition that revolved around dressing as monsters at Christmastime.
Another element of this earlier tradition is still visible in the bizarre repetition of the play through the village, a fossilised remnant of a time when monsters would go from house to house, parading through the town, knocking on doors and demanding to be let in.*
*) the reason this sounds an awful lot like trick-or-treating is because the two are related. However, it's a sign of how much Christmas spookiness we've lost that it feels genuinely surprising to discover that it was originally a Christmas cutsom that later spread to Halloween. In the Middle Ages, 'Souling' on Halloween was traditional - a ritual begging where people knocked on houses promising to pray for souls if they were given 'soul cakes' - but the terrifying costumes were added later, and seem to have slipped back into the season from Christmas.
Famously, Saturn also ate his children whole, a monstrous deed that was blended with the blood libel so that in one image of Saturn from the 1400s the god, shoving a child into his mouth, is identified by his hat and badge as Jewish. By the time that the child-killer was stalking the Nuremberg Carnival in the 1500s, though, the association etween the child-stealer and Judaism had largely slipped away.
[...]how Carnival and Christmas blended into each other, and the slipping back of the child-eater from February to early December seems almsot inevitable - not only was he a monstrous fancy-dress figure well suited to Christmas guising, he was also the punisher of bad children and it must have felt natural to pair him with St Nicholas, the rewarder of the good. In response, the stories told about St Nicholas began to warp and change to incorporate this chidl-eating figure - especially the legend of the murdered clerks. Soon, it wasn't a thieving innkeeper who murdered the boys but a starving butcher during a famine who slaughtered them, carved up their bodies, and had begun to pickle them in a vat before Nicholas arrived to save the day - the child-eater stopped in the act.
St Lucy has another side to her. This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white visions. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptized.
Lucy is celebrated well beyond the Nordic countries, finding her way into Bavarian and Austrian tradition where she is known as schiache Luz - bad Lucy - and bluadige Luz - bloody Lucy
first century BC, a general idea that women were more likely than men to use magic merged with female monsters called 'striga'- screeching demonesses who flew about at night in packs, ate the organs of children, and stuffed them with straw.
Herlequin. his horder
From the late Middle Ages on, the Christmas witch was as likely to be followed by a parade of the dead as a parade of women. And the legends of this calvacade became part of the folklore for waht would later be called the 'Wild Hunt'. In some places, Odin would take over from the witches to lead the dead, in others there would be werewolves mixed in with the group.
