The Dead of Winter - Sarah Clegg

I have an advance review copy of this book with a cover I actually like more than the finished hardback which is saving me from buying the finished hardback - something I'm rarely tempted to do, but I loved this book so much that I'd make an exception for it. 

The Dead of Winter is a survey of the Demons, Witches, and Ghosts of Christmas and it is an absolute delight - another easy entry into my top ten books of the year list when the time comes to put that together. Sarah Clegg is a knowledgable, academically sound, and overall amusing guide to the darker side of Christmas and where it comes from. 

The answers may be surprising depending on what you already know, or think you know, about Christmas traditions. The short version is that some things - like carnival have roots going back to antiquity, and some traditions are only a few hundred years old. We had mostly moved away from the darker side of the festive season, but the growing popularity of wassailing, Krampus runs, mummers plays and the Mari Llwyd snapping horse heads suggest we need something to balance the jollines of Santa and the saccharine effects of the John Lewis Christmas advert. Or maybe that as Christmas has increasingly become about children, we're looking for some more adult traditions to embrace.

Whatever theories you favour there's plenty to think about here. Clegg never mocks the eccentricities she meets - which might have been tempting for the winter solstice celebrations at Stonehenge, she does invite us to laugh with her at how she manages to scare herself on a pre-dawn Year Walk in an attempt to discover who in the parish will die in the next year. She doesn't believe in the possibility, but on a cold Christmas eve morning well before sunrise having observed the whole ritual - well then it's hard not to believe just a little in anything at all. 

This isn't a particularly dark book and certainly not a how to guide for dark rituals, but very much a survey of recorded folklore and how it's evolved. Exactly the thing to settle down with on a dark night and make you wonder if it's worth leaving out an offering of food and an open window on the 13th of December in the hope of being taken up by Saint Lucy's wild hunt and riding across the winter sky with her.