I posted this today, and it went completely unnoticed. Which is very interesting, considering how much people banged about Krampus only few days ago. Here is the real thing. St. Nicholas Day, aka "Little Christmas" In Austria, 1934:
St Nick comes out of the church accompanied by two women dressed in white...Brides???...He is awaited by "the devils" or "the demons"...Or, considering that most have sculls instead of faces, they could also be "the ancestors", "the dead"...
They form a procession which follows St Nick from the church and through the village...
All along they shout, bang their bells and shake their chains...One of them is carrying a "wooden grape picking basket" on his back...
The procession stops in front of every house.
The mother opens the door and takes the children out in front of the house...
St Nick then tells all the children to cross themselves, which they attempt to do as best as they can, while still staring at the grinning (devils, demons, dead) standing behind St Nick...
Once they cross themselves, the children are proclaimed to be "good children" and are given presents: apples, nuts, holy pictures...
But one child, instead of crossing himself, makes long nose at the procession (basically telling St Nick to stuff it).
The "bad child" is then stuffed into the grape picking basket, bucket and taken away by the (devils, demons, dead)...
Hmm...Grape picking basket? Wasn't there a god once, who loved grapes and wine, and who, every December, threw mad parties, during which he led processions consisting of his female followers, half men half beasts creatures, and the dead?
And wasn't his favorite punishment for women who didn't want to follow him to make them mad and make them kill their own children? And didn't Dionysus, allegedly, delight, as a child, in tearing kids into pieces and bringing them back to life again...
I don't know...
This made me look at our Sinterklaas with total different eyes. One thing I'm from the benelux (Flanders), and here 6 december is rather big Christmass. It is the main gift giving day and has more folklore around it. The stuff I found is basically a blog on it own.
ReplyDeleteOriginally Saint Nicks side kick was Pere fouetard or the whipping father. The most common depiction of Père Fouettard is of a man with a sinister face dressed in dark robes with scraggly unkempt hair and a long beard. He is armed with a whip, a large stick, or bundles of birch switches. Some incarnations of the character have him wearing a wicker backpack in which children can be placed and carried away. Sometimes he merely carries a large bundle of sticks on his back. (wikipedia) Sounds familiar?
The most interesting is that Pere fouetard and saint-Nick actually have the same attributes: long robes, long beard, old man, staff(rod in both cases) but Saint Nick is the white clean version and pere fouetard is the dark dirty version. This is important.
In Medieval time The feast of saint Nicolas was linked to the day of the innocent children on 28 december. On 6 december a "child bisshop" would be chosen and he together with his assistants would run around the town singing songs and dressed up, asking for (and getting) sweets until the 28 december. Saint Nicolas is now the main saint for the innocent children. This brings me back to pere fouetard and the rod.
Following dutch wikipedia(https://nl.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tuchtroede): Originally, however, the rod did not play a role as a tool of punishment in the Sinterklaas tradition either. It was a sign to indicate that a child had outgrown the Sinterklaas celebration and was thus on its way to adulthood; a child who had reached a certain age no longer received gifts but the rod.
This you still hear in the verses of a child song
Wie zoet is krijgt lekkers, wie stout is de roe
who is innocent get sweets, who is naughty get the rod
The rod in Dutch can stand for a lot of things but archaically it could also mean penis.
It seems that Saint Nicolas personified the innocent sweet child period of our youth and pere fouetard comes along and takes the sweet innocent children and give back naughty, horny! teenagers.
There are other things (the role of the rod, Klaaskoeken (Saint Nicks bread) ...) but this seems the main point.