Death, Duende, and Jingle Bells

Tomorrow shall be my dancing day;
I would my true love did so chance
To see the legend of my play,
To call my true love to my dance;

Sing, oh! my love, oh! my love, my love, my love,
This have I done for my true love.

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I've never thought of real traditional Christmas stuff as being especially cheerful and G-rated. This subject, brought up initially by a friend of mine, made me think of this photo from a Christmas show I was in several years ago. The plot involved several deaths and the highlight of the show was the curtains behind the throne transforming into a Shadow Knight puppet three times the height of the puppeteer working it, which chased one of the actors through the audience and terrified people before disappearing out a back exit. This was followed by a funeral scene (modeled after real traditional ceremonies, the girl in the veil is the human sacrifice) and the dance with the skeleton – the Danse Macabre -- set in an otherworldly ruined castle overgrown with evergreens and dead branches. And did I mention the prophetic dwarves who foretold the King’s defeat by the Shadow Knight?

And when the door begins to crack
It's like a stick across your back,
And when your back begins to smart
It's like a penknife in your heart,
And when your heart begins to bleed
You're dead, and dead, and dead indeed.

And then of course there's the Abbots Bromley, which is haunting and subtly sexual in a very weird way, and a medieval ballad called "Man mei longe him lives wene," the lyrics of which translate as follows:

Man may expect long life, yet often, for him, there waits a trick. Fair weather often turns to rain, and sunshine is wondrously made. Therefore, man, bethink thyself – all thy green youth shall fade. Well-a-day! Neither King nor Queen shall escape the drinking of death’s draught. Man, ere thou fallest off thy bench, quench thy sin.

All of this, I think, is fitting -- Christmas is a celebration of a joyous event, but it's also a mark of the darkest, coldest, hardest part of the year which has been observed by cultures worldwide throughout history. Şeva Zistanê, Yule, Meán Geimhridh, Ziemassvētki, Dongzhi, Yalda, Soyalangwul, Wayeb, Saturnalia, the list goes on. It's a celebration of a birth, but also of death -- the death of the year, the child who must die, the death of light, the fires guttering against the wind, the wolves at the door, and the ghosts in the frost on the window. Jacob Marley's calling. St. George fights the dragon and loses, and somewhere in a manger is an infant whose ultimate purpose is to be unjustly tortured and killed by a corrupt tyrant.

Cheerful holiday, yes?

The joy of this time of year comes from the people who MAKE joy in defiance of the world turning away from us in its deep sleep and reducing mankind to a few little candles while kings and shepherds and the son of God huddle on the straw and the dirt with the livestock. Like them, in the end, we share the same feral fear of the dark and the butcher's block. Looking at other traditional winter celebrations, it seems that regardless of time, race, religion, or place, our collective human consciousness has always viewed the winter solstice as a time when walls between the mortal and immortal worlds crack and crumble, and as they become less distinct, so too do the boundaries between humanity and the beasts whose warmth and grain we share, or whose howls and roars we flee. The ghosts we dressed our children as not two months ago are just as present, and seem somehow more real now.

Now. Here, in this time and place, we have become very good at making joy and lighting the darkness. The radios play jingle bells, the streets are decked in ribbons and wreaths and fairy-lights, cartoon images of jolly old gentlemen and his chipper little helpers are plastered to every window and wall. Yet even there, the echoed symbols of mankind’s more visceral nature brought out by the dark and the cold can be seen. Somewhere long ago and buried deep, claymation Rudolph and the herd of flying caribou merge back into the same sexually driven rut-instinct and raw strength that inspired the Abbots Bromley dancers to don the antlers of the game they hunted; and the Keeblerized toybuilders revert to their untraceably old selves:

...they are commonly described as semi-divine beings associated with fertility and the cult of the ancestors and ancestor worship. The notion of elves thus appears similar to the animistic belief in spirits of nature and of the deceased, common to nearly all human religions; this is also true for the Old Norse belief in dísir, fylgjur and vörðar ("follower" and "warden" spirits, respectively). Like spirits, the elves were not bound by physical limitations and could pass through walls and doors in the manner of ghosts, which happens in Norna-Gests þáttr.

All of these are part of what we are, the very root of humanity, the memetic ancestry of our collective consciousness. We laugh, we carol, give gifts and feast, but at the deepest heart of Christmas, we realize that we are infinite, and we embrace our duende.

And so the Shortest Day came and the year died
And everywhere down the centuries of the snow-white world
Came people singing, dancing,
To drive the dark away.
They lighted candles in the winter trees;
They hung their homes with evergreen;
They burned beseeching fires all night long
To keep the year alive.
And when the new year's sunshine blazed awake
They shouted, reveling.
Through all the frosty ages you can hear them
Echoing behind us -- listen!
All the long echoes, sing the same delight,
This Shortest Day,
As promise wakens in the sleeping land:
They carol, feast, give thanks,
And dearly love their friends,
And hope for peace.
And now so do we, here, now,
This year and every year.
~Susan Cooper