Old Christmas customs, strange beliefs and superstitions - by Lu Hersey

 Our superstitions and customs, like the way we live, have changed beyond recognition over the last century. Possibly the most superstitious thing you'll do this Christmas is cross your fingers you haven't burnt the turkey. You might still honour the old custom of decking your halls (ok, house, flat, room, whatever) with holly and ivy, but even that may well involve fake evergreens made in China. The old significance of evergreens as symbols of enduring and renewed life is almost forgotten. But worry not - this post is to tell you a bit more about some of the once commonly held seasonal customs and superstitions you might want to bring back - and a few you definitely won't. At the very least, your new found knowledge might lead to a host of new Christmas story ideas...

Most of the changes are down to modern lifestyles. How many of us go out to gather a Christmas faggot these days? Even the meaning of the word has changed. Faggots were originally simply bundles of sticks, and a Christmas faggot was a very special bundle. Nine ash sticks, bound with nine strips of ash cordage, brought into the home to burn on the Christmas fire and bring luck to the household for the coming year. A piece of unburnt ash stick was always kept to light the fire the following year for even more luck. (Incidentally, in case you're interested, faggot was first used as a term of abuse in the sixteenth century - against women, not men. Usually old, poor women who scraped a living collecting firewood.)

Anyway, a lot of old Christmas customs were to do with fire and light - traditions that probably hark back long before Christianity, and are more to do with yule and other midwinter festivals that celebrate a turning of the year and the return of the sun. 

Candles, especially beeswax candles, were a luxury form of lighting and weren't always seen as bringing light to your life - according to one superstition, lighting a candle from the fire in the hearth would lead to a miserable death in the workhouse (fortunately not an option these days, and the worst that will happen is you'll probably melt the candle if you try it). There are many superstitions about leaving candles burning in empty rooms (all kinds of doom can follow). But at Christmas, these rules change - a special Christmas candle left to burn through the night on Christmas Eve brings light, warmth and plenty for the following year. (Though I'm not sure there's any responsible health and safety guidance on this one..)

In Wales, watching the shadows made by the firelight of everyone present on Christmas Day might tell you who was going to die the following year. Anyone whose shadow was missing a head was destined for the afterlife in the coming months. So if you happen to be spending Christmas in a room lit only by romantic firelight, I'd advise taking care where you sit to make sure your shadow is complete. Just in case.

Many superstitions involved animals. It was a widely held belief that cows turn to the east at midnight on Christmas Eve and kneel in adoration at the holy birth, just as their ancestors did in the stable all those years ago.  Most of us are unlikely to test this by traipsing through fields of cowpats to find out - and anyway, according to another superstition, cows have the gift of speech on Christmas Eve and (of course) it's bad luck to listen to them. However, if you're up for going out at dawn on Christmas day, sheep (whose sheeply ancestors were also reportedly present in the stable at Bethlehem) are said to bow three times towards the east at first light. Probably because they can see the grass better facing that way at dawn, but who am I to question animal motivation?

Because the best candles were made of beeswax, bees were considered very special - constantly humming god's praises, providing delicious honey, and making beeswax for church altar candles. If you happen to keep bees, or know someone who does, it might be worth checking out the hives on Christmas Eve at midnight. Your bees (according to tradition) will be humming Psalm 100. Curious? Psalm 100 starts Make a joyful noise to the Lord - and bees humming surely counts as a joyful noise...

And so we come to food and all that midwinter feasting - starting with mince pies. Apparently if you eat a mince pie on every day of the 12 days of Christmas, you'll have twelve happy months in the following year. You should also accept any mince pies offered to you, even if you're already stuffed with the things. Refusing something that signifies good will and abundance can lead to a year of poverty (but possibly a slimmer waistline).

Bread baked on Christmas day was believed to have magical and healing virtues. If you kept a Christmas baked loaf in the house, it protected you from fire, accident and misfortune for the following year. Kept in the stable (not that many of us have one, but you never know when this information might come in handy) your Christmas loaf keeps away mice and weevils if you shove it in the corn.  The magical loaf can also cure dysentery, diarrhoea and stomach pain. Apparently.

There are many oddities I haven't time to cover here, but the strangest mostly involve people's need to find out their future - and Christmas Eve was supposedly a good time to do it. Like the 'dumb cake', a way of finding out who you were going to marry. Want to give it a go? 

First make a cake with flour, eggs, water and salt (between one and three people can try this at the same time). If there's just one of you, you carve your initials on the top of the dumb cake, leaving space for the initials of your future spouse. Their spirit/doppelganger will magically come to add their initials next to yours overnight - though you have to leave the door open, or something terrible will happen. So definitely wouldn't actually recommend trying this if you live in the inner city... 

If there are three of you, divide the dumb cake into three, take a piece each up to your room (walking backwards up the stairs) and eat your portion before going to sleep. You will dream of your future partner. Or get chronic indigestion. Possibly both.

I won't even start on the watching in the church porch idea. Ok, twist my arm...want to know who's going to die in the parish in the following year? Go to the church porch on Christmas Eve and wait there for an hour before and after midnight. At some point (usually around midnight), the forms of those who are soon to kark it will appear before you. Of course there's always the risk that you might be among them...

On that happy note, it only leaves me to wish you all a very merry Christmas (or whatever seasonal celebration you enjoy) and a happy new year. Preferably free of spectres or overdose of mince pies.

Lu Hersey

Because it’s Friday the Thirteenth – Lily Hyde

Vladimir Nabokov wrote his novels on index cards; Alexandre Dumas pere his non-fiction, fiction and poetry on different coloured paper (rose-pink, blue and yellow respectively). Edith Sitwell lay in a coffin before setting pen to paper; Colette prefaced writing by picking the fleas from her cat. Samuel Coleridge took opium, George Sand smoked cigars. Truman Capote only wrote on the sofa or in bed. John Cheever used to get up and into his only suit and take the lift down to the lobby with everyone else on their way to jobs in the office, then go to the basement, take off his suit again, and sit down in his underwear to write.

Colette: looking for fleas (by Jacques Humbert)

Superstition, habit, fetish, procrastination, ritual, magic, the muse. The Ancient Greeks burnt offerings on altars. Medieval poets had visions and fits. These modern stories (possibly apocryphal: writers make things up) of the lengths authors will go to harness their creativity are grist to the mill we keep turning out the myth of the writer as inspired, idiosyncratic genius.

But do these things really matter to writers, and to those wanting to know how to write, or are they a distraction? Surely what you need is rather more dull: to understand language, make up a story, and have the time and discipline to put that story into language. Do you really need a bizarre daily working habit, a superstition, a lucky charm, a (as people like to call it these days) ‘process’?

I need coffee; I need absinthe. I require music. I insist on silence. Special paper; my favourite pen. Only early mornings. It has to be late nights. It’s interesting that these superstitious rituals of inspiration are also generally means of repression, a way of fencing about the creative moment, defining its limits, at once trammelling and setting free. We dull our nerves with drugs so our neurons may fire, deafen our ears with music so as to hear our inner voice, confine our bodies to bed so our minds may travel far.

George Sand, sans cigar (by Eugene Delacroix)

A friend of mine sums up his prerequisite to creativity in one word: boredom. I understand that. When you’ve gone past utter boredom’s mix of frustration and desperation, and reached the knowledge that there is nothing else to do, nothing else that is good enough; when you’re the blank fog, the empty slate, then it’s almost as though there is no choice but to write.

Of all the writers’ rituals above, the one I find most convincing and moving is Cheever’s, who had to fit himself into the boring straitjacket of ‘normalcy’ (the suit, the crowded lift) that probably most of the office clones he was imitating were dying to escape, in order to achieve what they only dreamed of: being a free, Bohemian writer.

There’s a practical reason: it was his only suit; he wouldn’t want to crumple it by wearing it all day every day. But perhaps it was the fake, imposed dreary discipline he needed. Perhaps the contrast, perhaps the deception (of those office workers? Of himself?) The daily fictitious escape from boringness and boredom.

When people ask about my ‘process’, mostly I want to ask what they mean. Does an office worker have a process? A plumber? A painter?

Or else I want to tell them I light a candle and dress in layers of my grandmother’s petticoats, I lie back on a Persian carpet, slowly I let myself sink, down, down to the depths of hell, to endless acres of boredom and self-loathing and despair, mainlining coffee and plugged in to deafening dubstep… only then can I begin to write on precious strips of birch bark, in my own heart’s blood, naturally.

I’m a writer, I make things up. What’s your process?


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