Sarah Clegg on Dark Christmas Folklore: Mari Lwyd, Krampus & Festive Spirits
Ahead of her appearance at Hay Festival Winter Weekend, author Sarah Clegg speaks to MARK REES about her new book documenting winter’s spookiest stories and traditions.
(This interview was originally published in the Western Mail, November 2024)
Monsters of Christmas – From Krampus to the Mari Lwyd
Picture the scene: It’s a brisk New Year’s night in rural Wales. You retreat to the local pub, craving a fire and a tipple, when suddenly, someone – or something – bangs at the door. Out of the darkness, a strange shape emerges. A man in a top hat leads a figure cloaked in a white sheet holding a pole, at the end of which is a snapping horse’s skull – yes, a snapping horse’s skull – clacking in the chilly night air.
The Mari Lwyd has arrived at the watering hole on her annual outing to cause mischief in exchange for food and drink. Among those gathered to witness the spectacle is author Sarah Clegg, who has journeyed to Maesteg as part of her European quest to experience the monsters of Christmas, as documented in her new book, The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches, and Ghosts of Christmas.
This year, the Mari will be making an earlier appearance than usual at the Hay Festival Winter Weekend, where Sarah will be joined by other mysterious creatures for an evening of festive folklore. Other names heading to the Welsh “town of books” include acting royalty Rupert Everett, historian Jonathan Dimbleby, actress-turned-garden writer Caroline Quentin, and Welsh star of stage and screen Luke Evans, who will be in conversation with Carol Vorderman and turning on the Christmas lights.
Sarah’s event promises far more than your average talk; it will dive into the macabre mythology of Wales and beyond, reminding us that the Mari Lwyd is just one of many strange seasonal creatures. And it was one monster in particular – a far scarier prospect than the Mari – that proved to be the initial inspiration for her book.
“When I was planning the book, one of the main things I really wanted to do was go on a Krampus run,” says Sarah. For those unfamiliar, Krampus is a demonic figure celebrated in Alpine folklore, the evil counterpart to Saint Nicholas, infamous for punishing naughty children by beating them with birch rods. A Krampus run, as the name suggests, is an event where Krampuses gather en masse and, true to their nature, attempt to beat everyone around them.
“It was just incredible,” she recalls of her visit to Salzburg for such a run. “I’d seen YouTube footage of it, but still didn’t believe it was actually going to be like that. There were hundreds of Krampuses parading through the streets with no barriers between them and the crowd. They’ll drag you around, pull you in, chase you, hit you with their sticks. I got hit so hard that it left a really big bruise. It was wild, absolutely wild.”
Sarah also found inspiration in another “Christmas monster” from the Alpine region with an even darker reputation: Perchta.
“When I was researching my first book, Woman’s Lore, I came across Perchta, a monstrous witch with an iron nose who travels house-to-house every Christmas with 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, and stuffs them with straw. She was so joyously monstrous.”
At this point, you might be thinking this sounds more like Halloween than Christmas, but it was this very disconnect between the horrific and the cosy concept of Christmas that sparked Sarah’s fascination. Winter has long been a time for darker things; as Andy Williams sings in It’s the Most Wonderful Time of the Year, there’ll be scary ghost stories alongside marshmallows and carolling. For Sarah, Christmas is as much about continuing the spooky legacy of M.R. James and Charles Dickens as it is about roasting chestnuts.
Welsh Traditions in the Spotlight
After exploring Alpine customs, Sarah turned her attention to Welsh folklore, where no figure embodies the season’s eerie spirit quite like the Mari Lwyd, the equine mischief-maker who knocks on doors at Christmastime, traditionally around the Old New Year, Hen Galan. On her journey, Sarah visited both Chepstow – home to a long-running Chepstow Wassail that merges English and Welsh traditions – and Llangynwyd in Maesteg, believed to host the oldest continually-running Mari Lwyd in Wales. She recalls both vividly.
“Chepstow was incredible,” she says. “It was like a Morris-dancing Mari takeover of the town. There were events from midday well into the night, with so many different Mari Lwyds all crammed into a tiny orchard by the end. It was so much fun, this big gathering of people from all different places, all celebrating this one monster.”
Unlike the traditional Mari Lwyd that goes door-to-door, Chepstow’s event centres around an apple orchard, combining English wassailing traditions with Welsh customs.
“It’s very much leaning into the apple tree wassailing, which is much more of an English tradition – going into the apple orchards and wassailing there – whereas the Welsh wassail is much more house-to-house visiting, preferably with a monster. I dare say the Chepstow one is a blending of the two ideas. It’s right on the border; you can see England from there, so it did feel like this kind of lovely mingling of the traditions.”
Maesteg’s Mari Lwyd, however, was a different experience: “It did feel like two very different things,” she recalls. “This was tiny in comparison, in the corner of this little pub, by a smoky fire, with an incredibly low ceiling, full of Toby jugs – and the Mari Lwyd just came in. It was led by Gwyn Evans, who took over the tradition from his father, and everyone there apart from me seemed to be local to the area.
“They came and knocked on the door of the pub, sang their pwnco – this rhyming call and response battle which wasn’t there at Chepstow – did a circuit of the pub, making its way around and being given drink. These are very old traditions, and it felt much more rooted in the community. Everyone knew the names of both the person leading it and the person under the horse. It was so incredibly welcoming, absolutely lovely.”
But was the Mari Lwyd ever scary at any point? “No. There were a couple of moments which are suddenly jarring and unpleasant, like when you see a horse’s skull, stuck with bits of tinsel, glitter, and baubles in the eyes, which makes it more unsettling and more uncanny, but broadly, no it wasn’t – there was much less menace in my encounters with the Mari Lwyd than Krampus!”
The first account of such a horse-skulled monster in Wales, though not named the Mari Lwyd, dates back to the eighteenth century. However, the practice of placing an animal head on a pole with a clacking jaw dates to late antiquity and appears across Europe.
“In Europe, they tend to be horned – a stag’s head – which is much closer to the original that you get in late antiquity,” Sarah explains. “The horse idea seems to have come later. Monsters much like the Mari Lwyd appeared in places like Kent in England around the same time, but they fade out there, and the Hoodening horse, which is a wooden horse instead of a skull that opens and shuts its jaw, you can find across England.”
Regardless of their specific origins, for Sarah, these traditions have become essential parts of our modern-day festivities: “These are now Christmas celebrations. They’ve been part of Christmas for longer than most of our current traditions – no one’s got a Christmas tree up in fourth century AD!”
Folklore at Hay Festival Winter Weekend
And this tradition will continue in Hay-on-Wye when Sarah – and the Mari – visits St Mary’s Church. What can we expect on the night?
“Blackthorn Ritualistic Folk will be there, and they have Christmas beasts – a Mari Lwyd and a Turon, which is a European Christmas monster I’ve never seen in person before and am extremely excited about. They will be doing a performance in the churchyard beforehand lit by candlelight, and then John Kirkpatrick, a folk singer, will be playing some of his songs. It should be fantastic. I am so excited.”
What Comes Next
Looking to the future, Sarah is already hard at work on her next book, a continuation of her journey exploring folklore, but now focused on fairies. Having just been to a fairy ball in LA when we speak, and a trip to Iceland on the horizon for the “enormous fires” of Twelfth Night, Wales’s very own tylwyth teg will undoubtedly make an appearance: “You can’t write about fairies without including Wales!”
• The Hay Festival Winter Weekend in Hay-on-Wye runs between November 28 and December 1 in various venues. The Dead of Winter: The Demons, Witches, and Ghosts of Christmas by Sarah Clegg is published by Granta and available now.
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