A few days ago I mentioned the connection between Christmas and Halloween.  I’m apparently not the only one to be interested in this because Tim Rayborn wrote Scary Book of Christmas Lore.  This little, holiday-themed book is a gathering of (mostly) scary creatures associated with the winter holidays.  Each creature, or tradition, is treated in less than two pages and the book is generous with color illustrations.  While not a research book (it’s set out as an impulse buy in some Barnes & Nobles at least), nevertheless Rayborn, like yours truly, holds a doctorate from a university in the UK and spends at least part of his time writing books on spooky topics.  (More successfully than yt.) In the process of researching Sleepy Hollow as American Myth I gathered stories of scary Christmas creatures, but didn’t include most of them in the book.

Apart from the obvious Halloween connection, a few things stood out to me about this book.  One is that the majority of these tales come from Germanic cultures.  If these branch up into Scandinavia, almost all of the creatures in the book are covered.  There are a few from other regions as well, but this suggests that winters in Northern Europe used to be seriously scary.  Some of the darker visitors around the winter holidays are clearly local variations of others.  Krampus, for example, is having a day and there are other local versions of a monstrous companion to the “good cop” Santa who comes along to dole out punishment.  Some of the other beings associated with the season are a variety of other monsters—some human, others less so.

The long, dark winter suggests itself as a season for scary stories.  It’s unlikely that this book will send anyone shrieking into the closet or under the bed, but it helpfully brings to the light that people have long found both the fear and entertainment value of telling of frightening creatures.  The Teutonic imagination gave us many of our nighttime fears.  The British, inspired by such tales, tended to codify them into the monster stories that gave the modern horror genre its tentative start.  Although, as I discussed with my daughter on Christmas morning, horror stories began in the pre-biblical era (something I wrote about in an article a couple years back).  And, of course, religion and horror have naturally gone hand in glove for longer than anyone has really traced in any level of detail.  So a little book of monsters around Christmas?  Why not?