Sir Christemas

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 15

Not a version of the classic Christmas song I'd come across before, but a very pleasant distraction nonetheless...

I AM SCROOGE

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 14

Looking for something a little different to give your loved ones this Christmas? Perhaps one of your
family is a closet Dickens/Zombie horror fan. Well, if so, then I Am Scrooge could be the answer to all your Christmas gift-buying problems.

Marley was dead. Again.
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The legendary Ebenezeer Scrooge sits in his house counting money. The boards that he has nailed up over the doors and the windows shudder and shake under the blows from the endless zombie hordes that crowd the streets hungering for his flesh and his miserly braaaaiiiiiinns!
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Just how did the happiest day of the year slip into a welter of blood, innards and shambling, ravenous undead on the snowy streets of old London town?
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Will the ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future be able to stop the world from drowning under a top-hatted and crinolined zombie horde?
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Was Tiny Tim's illness something infinitely more sinister than mere rickets and consumption?
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Can Scrooge be persuaded to go back to his evil ways, travel back to Christmas past and destroy the brain stem of the tiny, irritatingly cheery Patient Zero?
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It's the Dickensian Zombie Apocalypse - God Bless us, one and all!

To buy your copy of I Am Scrooge, click here.

Bah.... Bahhhh.... Brahhh.... Braaiiinnss!

A Medieval Christmas

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 13

My children break up for the Christmas holidays today. They have three weeks off, which will be three weeks in which my productivity drops dramatically.

However, at least they don't finish as early as we did when I was a student at Warwick University, and at least their holidays don't last as long as the traditional Medieval Christmas.

Here's Dr Amanda Hopkins, of Warwick University's Department of English and Comparative Literary Studies, to tell us more.... (Do you see what I did there?)

The Medieval Christmas features again and again in my festive publication, What is Myrrh Anyway? Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas, published in the US as Christmas Miscellany.

From Mummer's Play to Pantomime, via School Nativity

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 12

For an old school friend of mine, it's panto season once again. And yesterday I got to enjoy my daughter's school nativity play.

One of the things you can read about in What is Myrrh Anyway? is how the traditional mummers' plays helped influence the development of the popular pantomime, not to mention the classic school nativity.

The words ‘mummer’ and ‘mumming’ either come from the German mumme, meaning a ‘mask’ or ‘masker’, or the Greek momme, meaning specifically ‘a frightening mask’. To hide their true identities (disguise being an important part of the mummers' ritual performance) many mummers wore masks made to look like different animal heads. One of these was the stag.

Just such a 'classic' Medieval mummer mask appears in an fourteenth century illuminated manuscript in the Bodleian Library of Oxford University. A marginal panel in the lower right corner of the verso of Plate 21 shows a stag masked mummer leading four other dancers (two women and two masked men) to a musical tune provided by a man playing the lute.

The stag mask itself is particularly ancient, dating to the stone age in Europe. A painting on the wall of a cave named Le Trois Freres in France clearly shows a shaman wearing a stag mask and costume. The style of the paintings in the cave place the image at the end of the Ice Age, around 15,000 to 10,000 BC!

Modern Wiccan believers see the stag as representing the powerful male spirit of the animal world, 'the source of masculine energy; he is the raw force, wisdom and law'. Some Medieval writers also identified the stag as a force for good, determined to stamp out evil, as in the natural world the animal will trample any snakes it comes upon.

All I want for Christmas...

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 11

 

Ain't No Sanity Clause

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 10

Fringeworks' first collection of Christmas stories, Ain't No Sanity Clause, edited by Theresa Derwin, is published today.

It contains stories combining psychopaths and other lunatics with a Christmas theme, and I'm in it. My story is called - appropriately enough - Claws.

You can find out more about this festive anthology here.

The National Christmas Tree

The Chrismologist's Advent Calendar - Day 9
American President Barack Obama and his family have turned on the lights for the US National Christmas Tree. The annual ceremony took place in Washington DC last Thursday.

The US national tree has been having a hard time recently - it's the third one in three years. Last year's died from the shock of being transplanted, and the tree before that was lost in a storm after standing for more than 30 years.

Mr Obama said, referring to his recent re-election: "It just goes to show, nobody's job is safe here in Washington."

Watch Neil Patrick Harris crash the vocal, as it were, here:

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To find out more about the Christmas tree and other Christmas traditions, pick up a copy of What is Myrrh Anyway? Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Christmas, published in the US as Christmas Miscellany.