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The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures by Sarah Clegg

3.84 AVERAGE

quoth_chloe's profile picture

quoth_chloe's review

4.0
I really loved this, it’s so interesting to learn about all the spooky stories behind Christmas and the festive period. Definitely recommend picking this up, definitely got me in the Christmas spirit
novel_natasha's profile picture

novel_natasha's review

4.0
adventurous dark informative medium-paced
amalia1985's profile picture

amalia1985's review

 The writer should be ashamed of herself. Writing a book to vilify Christmas, Christianity, even the purity of the feast of St Lucia is an abominable act. A desperate attempt to promote her atheistic agenda.

A book that could have been an excellent source of information and folklore became a libel towards Christianity. Girl, you will always be a part of the sad minority.

Shame on you. 

edmundh56's review against another edition

4.5
dark informative mysterious medium-paced
ceallaighsbooks's profile picture

ceallaighsbooks's review

4.75
dark funny informative lighthearted mysterious reflective relaxing fast-paced
“It's often said that Christmas is a celebration of the light - a way of driving out the darkness of midwinter, but I think we want to celebrate the darkness as well, to plunge ourselves into it, use it to make things as excitingly horrifying as they can be, to fill the night with monsters and scares that take full advantage of the longer, deeper darkness, and enjoy all the terrifying possibilities it brings, knowing deep down that it's a horror of our own making, and can be - just about - controlled. This is horror as entertainment - horror to be relished. There's too much fun in the monsters for them to be solely representations of a genuine fear, too much joy taken in the subversive excitement of rampaging through the night, whether as a witch, Krampus or snapping monster, too much laughter mingling with the screams that echo through the centuries.” 
 
author: Sarah Clegg 
published: 2024 
publisher: Granta Books 
 
genre: travelogue / historical nonfiction—Christmas 
setting: various in europe 
main themes/subjects: the history of Christmas, Carnival in Venice, Lords of Misrule & the Feast of Fools, the Victorian origins of our modern conception of Christmas, guising & the wasail, Christmas Witches, hypocrisy of the church & ruling classes, urbanization & industrialization leading to the end of pre-capitalist culture & community, folklore as something that is fluid & constantly changing, the joy & humor in the darkness of the season 
 
summary/blurbs/premise: “Sarah Clegg takes us on a journey through midwinter to explore the lesser-known Christmas traditions, from English mummers’ plays and Austrian Krampus runs, to modern pagan rituals at Stonehenge and St Lucy’s night in Finland. At wassails and hoodenings and winter gatherings, attended by grinning horse skulls, snatching monsters and mysterious visitors, we discover how these traditions originated and how they changed through the centuries, and we ask ourselves: if we can’t keep the darkness entirely at bay, might it be fun to let a little in?” 
 
my thoughts: 
I really enjoyed this book. It covered so much information & featured most of my favorite Christmas legends, monsters, & characters, & even though the informational—especially non-British—parts did feel maybe a bit surface-level, the intertwining of Clegg’s research with her sort of personal experiences & travelogue-esque writing style made the work as a whole quite successful & a really nice introduction for folks interested in learning more about the pagan influences on today’s modern Yuletide traditions. 
 
As an introduction to most of the dark Christmas folklore that is out there (both pre- & post-Christian, & Clegg’s discussion about the murkiness surrounding that delineation is also excellent) I can’t think of any book that does a better job. There are a couple of others though that would make excellent follow-ups to this book & I’ve linked them below in my further reading section. Clegg also includes a lot of great titles in her ‘Selected Bibliography’ at the back of the book. 
 
Something new I learned from this book was that St Lucia—with whom I have been familiar since I dressed up for her day at my Lutheran church in Moorhead MN when I was 5 or 6 years old (I’m still trying to track down that picture)—has a dark side & is counted among the various Christmas Witches in Clegg’s book. (Also apparently the Saint she prayed to in order to channel her healing powers was St Agatha who shares her feast day with my actual birthday so just the universe doing universe things again nbd.) Obviously I definitely will need to do more research on that front, especially now that my Swedish & Norwegian are becoming somewhat tenable, in terms of reading proficiency at least… 
 
“Behind every tale of Christmas monsters lurks the true darkness of Christmas - the solstice, and the longest night of the year. No matter how brightly our fires burn, or how many fairy lights we turn on, Christmas is still spent deep in the shadows.” 
 
A few criticisms: I was a bit turned off at times by what I felt were some anglocentric, sort of uncritical & fundamentally agnostic-christian takes from the author… some drastic oversimplifications (i.e. “but as people converted to Christianity, belief in the god Saturn faded” p 21) & some like a little bit judgy & unaware turns of phrasing (see my notes & annotations below) & I also thought she could have gone a littleee bit deeper than or been a bit more explicit about things like “yeah the systems of power were evil & fucked up but without them people KiLlEd EaCh OtHeR in the streets during these wild nights!! *gasthp & mock horror, pearls clutched*” like yeah, what do you think happens all throughout the rest of the year when the working classes can’t afford to feed themselves or seek medical attention due to their daily oppression & exploitation?? It’s a good thing no one ever dies at all for any reason ever the rest of the year due to systemic reasons, huh…. Like that super ick one-sided view of death-is-bad-but-only-under-these-specific-circumstances is so… I don’t want to say it’s almost belligerently obtuse… but… today is just not the time for that kind of wishy-washy-ness. 
 
… but as I continued to read I did come to appreciate the insertion of her personal opinions on both her experiences & her analysis of her research & that very abrupt kind of honesty & real-person-behind-the-words feeling she was giving because it made the insights & thoughts of hers that did land with me more impactful as well as clued me in to where it is good to think more critically about what she was writing so I ultimately was fine with getting the full face of her perspective & then being able to organize my thoughts in response without feeling like I needed to detract from the overall value of the book. 
 
i would recommend this book to readers who are new to Yuletide lore, as this serves as a great introduction, as well as folks who have a long-standing love of this lore & would like to see an interesting discussion of how these traditions are observed in contemporary contexts. this book is best read… cozied up beside the Christmas tree with a roaring fire in the fireplace. 
 
“Perhaps it's just that I've spent too long immersed in the darkness of the season, but to me at least, there's no contradiction between the glittering fairy lights and the horned, shaggy monster. In a world of snow and Christmas magic, he looks right at home.” 
 
final note: Her bibliography was legit. She also did explicitly mention both Palestine & trans folks in nice “call-to-attention” asides which just goes to show how easy it is to find even small ways to show solidarity & how there’s never a good excuse for saying nothing. I want everybody being vocal about these things & if Clegg can get it into a book about Christmas folklore, so can you, so can everyone. <3 
CW // animal cruelty 
spice level: 🌶️ —I don’t remember why I gave this one chili pepper but I’ll leave it… 
season: Yuletide 
 
further reading: 
Works mentioned /referenced in the book:

Click on the star ratings beside the titles I’ve read to read my reviews/thoughts about the book.

I earn commissions from the sponsored links to my shop on bookshop.org which allow me to keep the majority of my content like Book Reviews & Reading Lists free to all subscribers. <3
 
“And then just as dawn comes, improbably, impossibly, the clouds part for a moment and golden sunlight spills out. I'm standing right in the centre of Stonehenge, and it floods down to me through an arch in the outer ring, and then another in the centre, framed by two sets of stone doorways. In the cold dawn of midwinter as the sun rises at last after its longest night, there is silence and then joyous cheering, as we let the magic settle over us, let it seep through our skin. This magic is, in part, the knowledge that the relentless tide of darkness has turned, that light will start to return.”

Check out my review on StopAndSmellTheBooks.com for more of my favorite quotes, notes, & annotations. 
nikkifrances1979's profile picture

nikkifrances1979's review

4.5
funny informative lighthearted reflective medium-paced

buckaroonie's review against another edition

5.0
adventurous informative reflective medium-paced
I really enjoyed this! It wasn’t really scary to me but it was super interesting and informative!

evaalice's review

5.0
adventurous informative inspiring mysterious reflective fast-paced

telltailheart's review

3.0
informative inspiring mysterious medium-paced
torriebug's profile picture

torriebug's review against another edition

3.0
"It’s often said that Christmas is a celebration of the light – a way of driving out the darkness of midwinter, but I think we want to celebrate the darkness as well, to plunge ourselves into it, use it to make things as excitingly horrifying as they can be, to fill the night with monsters and scares that take full advantage of the longer, deeper darkness, and enjoy all the terrifying possibilities it brings, knowing deep down that it’s a horror of our own making, and can be – just about – controlled. This is horror as entertainment – horror to be relished. There’s too much fun in the monsters for them to be solely representations of a genuine fear, too much joy taken in the subversive excitement of rampaging through the night, whether as a witch, Krampus or snapping monster, too much laughter mingling with the screams that echo through the centuries."