Holiday Bonus: Krampus & Friends

For Christmas Eve, we’re sharing our 2016 episode about holiday figures from around the world. This one features the Mari Lwyd, which came up on a recent episode. 

See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Sunday. Since it's Christmas Eve, we have a special
holiday bonus episode today. It is the twenty sixteen installment
of our Crampus and Friends Holiday Special. This was actually
the third in a series of episodes that came out
in December over a stretch of years. We picked this
particular one because it includes Mari Nude, who came up

(00:23):
in connection to our recent episode on the Rebecca Riots.
If you would like to hear the earlier installments of
this series, they came out on December twenty first and
twenty third, twenty fifteen, and the fourth installment came out
on December fourth, twenty nineteen. While most of these figures
are part of the holiday lore for children in the
places where they've originated, we have gotten a few notes

(00:44):
from parents from other parts of the world saying they
were a little intense for their own kiddos. So if
you are thinking of sharing any of the Crampus episodes
with little ones, maybe just to give those a preview.
Listen first, Happy Holidays and enjoy. Welcome to Stuff You
Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio. Hello and

(01:12):
welcome to the podcast. I'm Holly Frye and I'm Tracy B.
Wilson and Tracy we've had a lot of heavy episodes
as of late. We sure have, which is great, but
we are heading into the holiday season and sometimes you
want to have a little frivolity. Yep. Last year we
did two episodes about holiday figures from around the world,

(01:36):
where we talked about the many non Santa Claus figures
that are celebrated during the winter season. So we talked
about Crampus, La Bafana Center, Claus Zvarta, Pete Grilla. When
Tracy went on her honeymoon, she brought me back a
lovely grilla ornament. We talked about bells, Nicole and Perfuard
and TiO Dintu, but there are more than that. So

(01:58):
today we're going to add a third installment. This'll be
the twenty sixteen edition of the Crampus and Friends Holiday
Power Hour, although right out of the gate, there's no
Crampus in this one. We're just using that naming convention
to continue the series for continuity, but you can always
go back to that previous episode and it's not really
an hour, So we're fibbers as well in that regard,
but it is intended to mostly just be a fun

(02:21):
way to think about the holidays. From some other perspectives,
some of it is very kooky, and you'll be like,
what that's a Christmas or New Year's tradition. Yeah. One day,
I think you were out of the office for some
reason and I put a little thing on our Facebook
that was like, Okay, what sorts of winter slash Christmas

(02:43):
slash yule tide topics do folks want to talk about?
Because sometimes it feels like we are nearing the end
of seasonal topics. And two of the stranger from my
interview figures we will be talking about came directly from

(03:05):
the folks suggestions. Yeah, yeah, and I'm you know we
love more. So if you want this to happen again
a year from now, feel free to keep sending those.
We'll keep a list. Even though Holly just beautifully pronounced
so many names, we do want to say there are
a lot of different languages represented here. We don't speak

(03:29):
any of them. We are gonna make our best, heavily
researched effort to try to say all of these right,
but please forgive us when we don't. And I would
say I think Tracy is probably being very kind when
she says, I beautifully pronounce those because I'm confident there
was some butchering taking place as you were reading them,
though I was like, oh, those sounds so lovely. We're

(03:55):
going to begin with Frau Perchta, who is a holiday
figure associated with the Alps. She's common in Austrian and
Southern German folklore, although she's certainly not confined exclusively to
that area, and she's been part of the lore in
other places as well, And there are also some slight
variations to her name which generally correlate to how she

(04:16):
is represented in different geographical areas. And there's a bit
of debate around Perta's origins. Scholars who link her to
Paganism suggest that she was originally a goddess figure that
then became twisted into a more sinister hag character as
Christianity enveloped cultures that had pagan roots and kind of
tried to adopt and adapt those ideas. So her name,

(04:39):
according to Jacob Grimm's Deutsche Mythology, meant shining one. But
it's also suggested that her name was potentially originally a
completely different word, which was stempe, associated with stamping, sort
of a more violent, angrier kind of idea and the
darker parts of her mythology. And she's also sometimes associated

(05:01):
with a figure called frau Hola or frau Hola. Sometimes
they're kind of represented as sisters or cousins, or one
is the northern version, one is the Southern version, and
that's a figure of possibly Scandinavian origin who's also associated
with agriculture and the arts and has parallel festival timing,
which is why they're often linked together. But much of

(05:22):
Perta's origin story is a mess of speculation and piecing
together puzzles which are missing really big pieces. This is
one of those cases we often find where one writing
in this case Grim's asserts some things and it gets
picked up and repeated as facts without any actual substantiation
for those claims. Yeah, that happens a lot, particularly in folklore.
I'm sure anybody should we have any folklore scholars listening,

(05:46):
They know that this is a big part of picking
apart and teasing out the truth of any given origin story.
So away from the paganism interpretation. There is a folklore
scholar named JB. Smith, and he spoke at a conference
in two thousand where he described her more as the
folkloric personification of Epiphany, and this was as he put

(06:06):
it in a paper that he published later quote in
harmony with a general medieval tendency to personify feast and
fast days. I'm just gonna take a moment to say,
I really miss Labifana the Epiphany, which you don't have
to miss her. You can have her in her home
this holiday season. Sure so, Frau Parkta's role as part

(06:27):
of a holiday celebration has evolved just the same as
many many other holiday figures. She shows up during the
twelve days of Christmas, and in modern traditions she has
come to be known as sort of a behavior barometer
for keeping children in line. Good children are rewarded and
bad children are punished, and lying makes her especially angry.
She's kind of a grumpy protector, taking care of people

(06:50):
and warding off evil, but really ready to dole out
penalties if she thinks you've misbehaved. But earlier incarnations of
Practa were much darker in the judgment of good versus
bad behavior, so she would punish people who worked, specifically
those who worked at spinning, which is a task she's
very closely associated with. Who did that on holidays or

(07:14):
did not participate in community feasts and celebrations. So she's
often referenced as like the keeper of an enforcer of taboos,
So like you do not work on holiday, you'd take
that time to be part of the community and feast
at times, and her mythologies, she's taken on some truly
gruesome characteristics. She would seek out the lazy members of

(07:35):
a community and then punish them for their lack of
motivation by cutting open their bellies, removing their viscera, and
then filling them up with garbage. There are some lines
that can be drawn from all of this belly slitting
and her connection to feasting and making sure that people
observe the holiday calendar. Ee yeah, there are some kind

(07:59):
of theory reticals where people say, oh yes, because they're
not taking part in the feast, she will fill them
with things that they don't like if they're not willing
to be part of that meal in celebration and community moment.
But her sinister holiday dealings were not just about doling
out consequences for the lazy. Greed was also a target
and even being too inquisitive, So you can see how

(08:20):
this kind of gets really to the heart of that
whole community thing, like basically, don't be a troublemaker, do
your work when you're supposed to, take breaks, and be
part of the community when you're supposed to. And there
are even some less common variations in her lore in
which she finds children who have lied. We mentioned a
moment ago that she really hated it, and she scrapes
their tongues with glass. In some places, her legend extends

(08:44):
beyond winter and the winter holidays and crosses over with
other mythical figures. She's said to live in lush wooded
areas and in lakes in the summertime, and to bless
flocks of sheep for shepherds who brought her flax when
it was warm. She was, in some places so associated
with this more agrarian spinning culture that it was said

(09:05):
that she could sometimes be seen wandering the green slopes
of mountains in twilight carrying a golden spindle. And then
she moved into the more mountainous caves in the winter,
which is where she would make snow just sort of
lovely and nicer than her cutting people open and stuff
and garbage in their abdomens. There are some really specific

(09:25):
folklore stories about Perkta, and there are three that we're
going to mention. These were referenced again in that longer
paper by JB. Smith, and they feature traveling with sort
of a band of ghosts, and those are those of
unbaptized children who could not travel to their afterlife. So
she and this group of spirits, and sometimes these spirits
are characterized in this benign way as sort of these

(09:47):
orphans and unbaptized children, but at other times they're depicted
more as a collection of demons that travel with her,
and those are referred to collectively as Perkton. And in
these tales, which are more modern, she serves in a
role which rewards good for the most part, rather than
her more terrifying belly slitting, tongue scraping incarnation. In one,

(10:08):
while she's traveling with her party of unbaptized children and
a carriage over rough terrain, a wheel falls off of
their ride, and a kind passerby makes a new lynchpin
by carving it from wood, and she tells him to
keep the woodch shavings, which then turn into gold in
his pocket. Sort of a much nicer version. In another story,

(10:28):
an impoverished man goes looking in the night for a
god parent for his newborn child, and this baby in
the story is a fresh addition to an already large
family that he is struggling to provide for, and when
he happens upon Perchte and her destitute children in the woods,
he shows them compassion, remarking to one who looks especially
poorly clothed. In some stories, this child is wearing only

(10:50):
their undergarments. I'm going to butcher this word, so I
apologize you, poor little Zotovasher in addressing the child with
a name which apparently translates roughly to ragged little mite,
and showing kindness, he earns Perchta's blessing, and good fortune
soon comes to him in the form of a wealthy benefactor.
The last of the Pekta's stories that Smith recounts features

(11:13):
a farm hand who hides in a stove to spy
on Percta and her children after his employer prepares a
room for them in their farmhouse for twelfth night. When
the travelers arrive, she tells one of the children to
plug up a hole she sees in the stove, and
that was the one that the farm hand was looking through.
He waits out their stay and when he's when he

(11:33):
emerges after they've left, he realizes that he is blind.
He returns to the stove the following year, and this
time Pecta tells her child to unplug the hole in
his stight his site is restored. I've made a note
that it's like mythical laser. So while Parkda's modern incarnation

(11:54):
follows the frequent theme of holiday figures designed to encourage
good behavior in children during the holiday, she has throughout
her years been many things to many people, but always
with a touch of magic, and of course including some
of those dark things like being a belly slitter. There
are also areas where a modern Pechton celebration takes place,
and it's kind of like Krampusnacht where her demons, which

(12:16):
are young men in scary wooden masks called shaia Pechten,
run through the streets of the town, and in some
places this happens twice. The scary version comes first, and
then later when they run through the streets again, they
are en handsome non demonic forms, which sounds kind of
fun to me, but also exhausting if you have to

(12:36):
do it. Twice, So we're gonna pause in the festivities
here for a little break from one of our sponsors.
So next up is the Welsh holiday figure Mari Luid,
and this name translates to gray mayor. You'll sometimes also

(12:57):
see it as holy Man Gray Mary, and it can
be to foreigners sort of equal parts festive and frightening.
It almost seems, if you are not familiar with this custom,
more like a Halloween celebration, because while the marii Luid
is a character of sorts, it's really an act of Mary.
Though macabre puppetry. The mari Luid tradition is believed to

(13:21):
bring good fortune, and it all starts with a horse
skull on New Year's Eve. That skull is then adorned
with decorative ears and eyes and dressed up with accessories
like bright ribbons and bells, and that's carried around on
a pole, usually with a sheet wrapped around it to
conceal the person who's carrying the pole. And traditionally the
Madi Lud was carried door to door by merrymakers who

(13:44):
would sing, They would challenge the occupants to verse battles
and ultimately, if the maighti Luid bearers were the winners
of those battles would ask to be invited into the
home they were visiting. And there's actually a really fun
BBC film from nineteen sixty six of this call and
respond of song that goes on that's available on YouTube
and we will have a link to that in our

(14:04):
show notes. Once inside the home, the visitors would be
treated to refreshments and sometimes would receive small gifts of cash,
and in exchange they would entertain for a bit before
moving on to the next town. To have Marie lud
in your home was believed to bring with it good
fortune and to clear the home of bad spirits. So
really this whole horse bearing visitors are always invited in

(14:28):
for some hospitality. Yeah, they always win in the battle,
whether no matter how it plays out, they're always kind
of the winners, and so they get to come in.
And this is actually, if you really want to trace
it back to its most basic roots, a very very
old tradition and it's certainly not exclusive to Welsh culture. Certainly,
performing with animal masks and singing in call and response

(14:48):
style as part of a cultural tradition and sharing food
and drink have been parts of very ancient customs that
build community and mark the changing of the seasons, way
way back into mankind history. As for the origins of
this particular tradition, because of how old it is, things
are kind of nebulous really quickly, but piecing together the ingredients,

(15:09):
the horse in Celtic Britain represented fertility and strength, and additionally,
the idea of passing back and forth from the living
world to the underworld is one that held a lot
of power and this is the horse's skull. So the
horse is deceased. Yeah, so the horse is doing that
passing back and forth as part of this New Year's celebration.

(15:29):
But this old form of caroling turned friendly competition has
also had a really pretty active revival in recent decades.
There are a number of small groups that like to
perform the Mari Luid in various Welsh towns as well
as bigger regional gatherings where the horse skull puppet comes
out and this old ritual is enacted really with great glee.

(15:50):
This is another thing you can find videos of online
and they're really quite fun. In addition to all the
New Year's appearances, it's also sometimes there are appearances in
the spring. Yeah, and there's also for people who are
curious what this actually looks like. There is a really
interesting flicker group that we will link to in the
show notes so you can see photos of some of
these decorated horse skull puppets. They're really quite fun. It

(16:13):
sounds a little weird and creepy if you're not familiar
with it, but it seems so joyous and delightful when
you actually get to watch it. Our next holiday figure
is from Basque Country and it's sort of a Santa
Claus variation. Olinciro is an old man, grubby with smears
of coal dust and has a pot belly, and that
may initially sound similar to Santa but Olncero is not

(16:37):
dressed in red fir trim suits. He wears more standard clothing,
usually that of a peasant farmer, and he has a
big red nose. Yeah. I was reading a translated page
about him where that there was a significant hint that
his nose suggested that he had some pretty chronic drinking habits.
But I don't know if you if we should include

(17:01):
that because it was just in the one spot and
following the theme of many of these holiday characters. Olensiro's
origins are not entirely clear. His name may suggest the
idea of calling or asking related to an older Basque
tradition where children would go from house to house sort
of singing for their supper. They would entertain in the
hopes of getting food or money, but this was not

(17:23):
like trick or treating. They would actually collect these things
and then they would go back to their own home,
and that food and money that they had gathered would
be used to assemble a feast meal. In writings dating
back several hundred years, Olencro appears as a member of
a race of giants who lived in the Pyrenees. According
to this legend, these people saw a glowing cloud in

(17:45):
the sky, so bright that it was painful to look at,
and a man who was partially blind could look at it.
So the giants held him aloft so he could get
a closer look. When they put him back, he said
the sign was He said that the cloud was a
sign of the birth of Jesus. Okay, so this may
sound sort of nice and kind of an interesting and

(18:07):
variation on this story up to this point, but brace
because things are about to get really really weird. So
fearing the changes of the world that the arrival of
the Son of God might hearken. This old, partially blind
man wanted to die, and he asked the giants to
throw him off a cliff, and they walked up a
mountain and fulfilled this wish. But then as they descended,

(18:27):
they all fell to their deaths save one survivor, and
that was Olenceo. Now, according to this about to get
Grizzly legend, Olencero continued down the mountain into the villages below,
and they got there and punished people who were eating
too much on the day before Christ's birth by slitting

(18:49):
their throats. There's some irony here, and that Olencero was
something of a glutton and a little too fond of drink.
So that's a little dark. Uh yeah, that's maybe not
the most merry Christmas story ever, And that is not
the story as it's told today. So now Olentro is

(19:10):
not a giant but a regular human man who spreads love.
And in this version of the story, he was adopted
by a fairy after having been found in the woods
as a baby, presumably abandoned, and as he grew up
he became a charcoal maker, and then he would carve
figures out of the charcoal to create toys for children,
and he would visit villages and distribute these toys every

(19:30):
time he had filled his sack up with them. And
on one such toy distribution visit, he was trapped while
saving Sometimes it's one child, sometimes it seems like it's
several children from a burning house. And he became trapped
in the house and it looked like that was his end.
But his fairy mother came to him in that moment,
and to reward him for his bravery, she not only
saved him, but made him immortal so he can make

(19:53):
and share toys with children forever. Now, life size figures
of Alenco are made with wood or paper mache, and
then they're carried through the streets on Christmas Eve. Yeah,
I read in one spot, but I couldn't verify again
because most of this is foreign language and I'm reading
interesting translations. Sometimes he is set on fire as part

(20:15):
of the festivities to kind of represent that story. So again,
an interesting twist on the Christmas story. And I need
some eggnogs, So let's pause for a sponsor break. Does
that sound yummy to you, Tracy? Yes? Okay, let's have
a sponsor break, We'll get some agnog and then we'll
get to our next holiday story. Dead Motros or Father

(20:42):
Frost is a Slavic variation on Santa Claus and Dead
Morros is an icon of winter, and he and his
granddaughter or daughter or possibly fairy god daughter, depending on
your source, Snegarochka bring New Year's gifts as they ride
in their sleigh, which is drawn by a trio of
horses and all so includes a beautiful evergreen tree as
its cargo. Snegarochka is often mentioned as the thing that

(21:07):
sets dead Morotes. Apart from other Santa like figures, of
which there are many, none of the others travels with
a female counterpart. Snegarochka is also called the Snow Maiden
or just Snowy, and as we just mentioned, she has
a number of different roles because her origin story really
varies quite greatly. She may be Father Frost's daughter with

(21:27):
the Snow Queen, or she might, as one legend tells it,
be a girl made of snow by a couple desperate
for a child and then brought to life by their love.
In a legend, because she cannot withstand the transition from
winter to spring without changing form. She sometimes becomes a
cloud after the warmth melts her, and so she represents
the changing of the seasons and when she appears with

(21:50):
dead mottoes. However, Snegarochka is a gorgeous, glamorous creature. Her
long winter robes are always bejeweled, and she helps deliver
gifts to good children. She also serves as sort of
this bridge between Father Frost and the children, because she'll
play with the kids and she'll get Father Frost to
join in from time to time. Dead Morots has roots

(22:11):
in the Saint Nicholas story of course, as well as
the Russian hero figure of Morotzko, who is similar to
Jack Frost, sometimes described as a demon of snow who
can freeze water with his cold iron fists. Morotzko and
in turn Dead Morots as a duality of nature, a
protector of the good and the hard working and the
punisher of the lazy and deceitful. Yeah, pretty common theme

(22:35):
through all of the holiday figures that we've talked about
on the three episodes we've done on these, for they,
you know, reward the good and punish the bad. And
while Dead Morots is similar to Santa in many ways.
His style sets him apart a little bit. His great
fur coat is ankle length, and it and his cap
are normally heavily embellished with white and metallic sort of

(22:59):
graphical scrollwork designs that can range from like I said
that scroll work to you know, a smattering of stars.
They often include pearl and crystal beating that mimics sparkling snow.
He also carries a magical staff that helps keep sweet
old Father Frost as nimble as a youngster as he
travels through the cold winter night. In the late nineteen nineties,

(23:20):
it was decided that Dead Moritz's home is a small
town in northern Russia called Veliky Ustieg, which is in
the Vologodsky region, and if you like, you can get
on a train and go visit him there where he
lives in a log cabin that sits at the point
where three rivers meet. And Dead Barots is fortunately a

(23:41):
voracious reader, because he spends his non winter time pouring
over all of the letters that he gets from the
children of Russia, carefully noting what their New Year's gift
wishes might be his. But Dead Moritz has his own
dark past and his mythology. While now he is known
as this kindly sweet man who spreads love and toys,

(24:03):
he has been written about has a much more terrifying figure.
Nineteenth century poet nikolay necrosoft pen a poem called Morrit's
Red Nose in which Father Frost was a cruel was cruel,
freezing people to death for his own amusement, and one
particularly horrifying move in the story, he freezes an impoverished
widow and then laughs at her orphaned children. That's not cool,

(24:28):
not nice at all. No, but eventually his image did soften.
But what really ended up sort of changing things for
Dead Moros is the Bolshevik Revolution. It halted appearances of
this particular holiday figure for a time, so from nineteen
seventeen into the nineteen thirties the sort of anti religious

(24:49):
movement made Dead Moros, who is seen as a children's
god and unwelcome cultural icon. But he did re emerge
in the mid nineteen thirties. His views shifted slightly and
his benefit to the children of the country was seen
as more important than the rejection of the bourgeoisie figure.
Although this is really when he kind of became solidified
as a New Year's visitor rather than a Christmas figure.

(25:11):
After the dissolution of the Soviet Union in nineteen ninety one,
variations on dead Morotes developed in the various countries that
had previously been part of the USSR. Yeah, there are
certainly similarities, but some have even changed up the name
to really sort of set theirs apart and kind of
create their own cultural traditions. But since two thousand and

(25:33):
two there's been this other interesting tradition that Dead Modotes
has been part of sort of an act of political goodwill.
So every year Father Frost has a holiday meeting with
Finland's Santa Claus at a spot on the border that
the two nations share, and literally, while border guards look on,
children perform songs and dances, and the two holiday figures

(25:55):
exchange gifts with one another. According to reports that I found,
in twenty fourteen, Santa Claus gave Dead Modots a universal
charger for mobile devices, possibly to keep the elves charged
up and ready, and Dead Modots gave Santa Claus a
picture book with Vladimir Putin on the cover. And then
in twenty fifteen things became a bit more traditional. Dead

(26:15):
Monots gave Santa an ice snowflake, and Santa Claus in
turn gave him a basket of sweets. So no telling
what this year's exchange might include it. Maybe it will
once again be traditional or maybe ultra modern. We don't know.
I I'm not completely sure why because it doesn't exactly
add up, but Snegarochka really reminds me of Susan from

(26:39):
the Discworld books, and so now I want to go
watch Hogfather. Oh well, yeah, there's also if you look
at her, you can see that there's to be very
modern culture e. You know, she is a snow princess,
so she bears some resemblance to things like Elsa from Frozer,
you know. Any even though Elsa's sort of a more

(27:00):
Norway based idea, there's still like the long blue, silvery
robes that have all of this sparkle and ice on them,
so I thought of that as well. Yeah, it doesn't
make a lot of sense that she reminds me of Susan,
except that Susan is a daughter and is in Hogfather like,

(27:20):
which is also a holiday tradition in its own for
many people. Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday.
Since this episode is out of the archive. If you
heard an email address or a Facebook RL or something
similar over the course of the show, that could be
obsolete now. Our current email address is History Podcast at

(27:44):
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(28:04):
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