Take a look at weird and wonderful Christmas traditions around the world. Photo / Getty Images
Peter Dragicevich takes a look at weird and wonderful Christmas traditions around the world.
Bearded guys in red suits, angels impaled on pine trees, exploding cardboard tubes stuffed with plastic toys and bad jokes… all totally normal at this time of the year, right? How about lucky pickles, defecating logs and horse skulls on sticks?
Christianity is a global religion with around 2.4 billion believers worldwide, so it’s not surprising that different cultures celebrate this major feast in very different ways. Although there are some recurrent themes.
Let’s start by admitting that our own Christmas culinary traditions are pretty weird. In the week of the summer solstice, many of us will be serving up glazed ham and a full roast dinner in the hottest part of the day, followed by heavy puddings and cakes smothered in brandy butter and custard.
Hearty hot food makes much more sense in the northernmost parts of Europe, where the Christmas feast would help to see you through the bleakest part of winter. In Estonia, verivorst is an iron-infusing seasonal centrepiece – pig’s blood mixed with oats and herbs and shoved into a casing of pig intestine to make a kind of black pudding. In contrast, their near neighbours the Lithuanians sit down to a Christmas Eve feast consisting of 12 traditional fish and vegetable dishes served on a table covered in hay. One place is always laid for someone who died recently.
Further north still, in Greenland, you’re more likely to find reindeer on the table than pulling Santa’s sleigh. Most of us would choose that over mattak – a dish made of fermented whale skin with blubber still attached. Then there’s the Greenland Inuit speciality kiviak, where small seabirds called auks are sewn into a seal skin and fermented – beaks, feathers and all.
Arguably that’s not as odd as the Japanese tradition of heading to KFC for a Christmas feast. In 1974 the Japanese franchise started promoting “Kentucky For Christmas” and now, in a country where only around 1 per cent of the population is Christian, more than 3.6 million families indulge in a greasy bucketload over the Christmas period.
The earliest publicly displayed, decorated Christmas trees were erected in the main squares of Estonia’s Tallinn and Riga in Latvia in the 15th century by the unfortunately named Brotherhood of Blackheads, a medieval guild for unmarried men. Fortunately, the practice of drunkenly setting it alight on Christmas Eve never caught on, but both of these fairytale cities still erect beautiful trees in the same spots to this day.
One of the more unusual tree traditions is the practice of hiding a pickle-shaped bauble within the boughs, which is supposed to bring good luck to the person who finds it. The origins of this custom are sketchy, but it seems that in the late 19th century an American importer of glass ornaments managed to convince customers that this weihnachtsgurke (Christmas gherkin) was a German tradition despite most Germans never having heard of it.
If there’s a country that could do with good luck this Christmas, it’s Ukraine – and it’s got its own lucky tree decoration in the form of silver spiderwebs. The tradition derives from a story about a poor family that couldn’t afford to decorate their tree waking up on Christmas morning to find that a sympathetic spider had done it for them.
Many of us have had crappy Christmases at some time or other, but no culture revels in the scatological during the festive season quite like the Catalans. Meet Tio de Nadal, a hollow log that is now usually painted with a smiling face at one end and propped up on leg-like sticks. For the weeks preceding Christmas, Catalan children are encouraged to take good care of the log, making sure it’s kept warm by the fire. Then, on Christmas Eve, they beat it with sticks, all the while singing “Caga tio! (Poop, log!)”, exhorting it to defecate gifts – traditionally nougat, nuts and figs.
Most of us will be familiar with nativity scenes, tableaux depicting the modest circumstances of Christ’s birth, in a stable surrounded by animals and adoring shepherds. In Catalonia, however, another character lurks in the background, an image of a defecating peasant known as El Caganer (The Pooper). He may not be mentioned in the Bible, but he somehow adds to the humble earthiness of the setting.
In the Mexican city of Oaxaca, nativity scenes (sans excreting peasants) were carved into giant radishes to attract people to stalls at the annual Christmas market. This has now evolved into the Night of the Radishes where, on December 23, a competition is held to select the best radish carving – everything from representations of the Madonna and Child to political messages. As radishes wilt quickly, the whole thing is over within a handful of hours.
While Santa’s fabled naughty-or-nice list is a favoured parental tool at this time of the year, other cultures have come up with far scarier motivators for good behaviour. In Austria and neighbouring areas, St Nicholas distributes small gifts to good children on his feast day (December 6), while naughty children are confronted with a terrifying horned and hairy devil known as the Krampus. This fearsome figure appears in parades wielding birch branches, with which he periodically whacks passers-by – occasionally inducing street brawls.
In some parts of South Wales, you may be visited by the Mari Lwyd, a horse’s skull mounted on a pole with cloth draped around it, disguising its bearer. Traditionally a team of men accompanying the Mari Lwyd would travel to people’s houses, singing songs to demand entry. The householder would then reply in song, which would go backwards and forwards until the party eventually gained entry and was given food and drink.
Italy, on the other hand, has La Befana, a broom-carrying witch-like figure who appears on the eve of the Epiphany (January 5) distributing candy or fruit to good children and coal or onions to bad ones. These days the coal is usually caramel-blackened rock candy and most children can expect to get a lump, as who hasn’t been bad at least once during the year? One legend has it that La Befana was invited to join the Magi when they visited the Christ Child but declined as she was too busy sweeping her house. She subsequently regretted her decision and has spent the last two millennia searching for the newborn King, leaving gifts in her wake.
Then there’s perhaps the strangest tradition of all. That in which Christmas – a feast celebrating the belief that God took human form and chose to be born poor and powerless – has morphed into a largely secular season of consumerism and overindulgence. Compared with pooing logs, who can say which is more peculiar?
Some domestic regional flights have been affected.