Christmas season seems to start earlier each year, with those devoted to the colorful lights, trees, and decorations hauling them out even before the candles in the jack o’ lanterns have been extinguished on October 31st.
This type of devotion to and acceptance of full Christmas displays has become the new norm, with carols ringing through the air long before the end of Macy’s Thanksgiving parade ushers in Santa Claus as the guest of honor.
For devotees of Halloween and all things that go bump in the night, the premature take over has a tendency to rub us the wrong way. Can’t we have just a few remnants of Halloween through the winter season?
Enter author and researcher Jeff Belanger who attempts to save Christmas in his new book, The Fright Before Christmas, in the hope that “…we can return the true spirit of this creepiest of holidays” to the masses.
Creepy? Christmas? Yes, the origins of the pre-Christmas festivals such as Saturnalia (and how it inadvertently led to the establishment of the Christmas holiday), the Winter Solstice, the Nordic Yule feasts, and other pagan celebrations included their fair share of frights and folklore, springing from the coldest and most desolate time of year.
The newly resurrected patron saint of Christmas, Krampus, obviously gets the lion’s share of the investigation (and the coveted cover spot), but plenty of other human and inhuman beasts are uncovered in The Fright Before Christmas, with chapters dedicated to Tomten, Karakoncolas, the Belsnickel (which The Office brought back to public consciousness in recent years), Gryla, the Yule Cat, and the mischievous Yule Lads.
Belanger (who has written a number of books on ghosts such as The World’s Most Haunted Places, Weird Massachusetts, and Our Haunted Lives) travels around Europe for all of his stories, and spends just enough time on each subject before moving on to the next creature or tradition, also taking time to explain how the pagan traditions morphed into the amalgamated holiday we know as Christmas today.
For those modern Christmas purists, don’t worry, as Santa gets just as much ink as Krampus in tracing how the jolly old elf became the Coca-Cola Claus that we know today. As Belanger says in his book, “…in the bleakest days of Midwinter, people need a good guy”, and who can argue with that?
The Fright Before Christmas’ smaller trim size (and imbedded book mark) makes the edition a nice size for a holiday gift, and also contains many vintage illustrations and paintings of the darker denizens of Christmas. Belanger’s wit and sense of humor also come through in each entry, balancing the history lessons and scholarship with laughs. Belanger informs without taking himself too seriously, so prepare to be entertained in a variety of ways.
So if you are pining for a little more fright and terror (besides Black Friday) with your eggnog this year, you will be pleased with Belanger’s Christmas bestiary.
The Fright Before Christmas is currently available in finer bookstores everywhere.
