I’m pleased to say my article about Christmas folklore is on 34 of today’s Sunday Express. You can also read it here:
http://www.express.co.uk/comment/expresscomment/448772/Naughty-or-nice-Meet-the-real-Santa-Claus
There’s also a write-up of the book in today’s Sunday Herald:
http://www.heraldscotland.com/books-poetry/reviews/paul-hawkins-bad-santas-simon-schuster.22898326
and the book was recommended in Thursday’s Metro:
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However, the crucial thing for the Protestants was that he was most definitely not St Nicholas. In fact, he was most definitely not a saint at all. In order to definitely not be a saint, he definitely did not wear bishop’s robes or any other religious insignia. And he definitely did not deliver presents on St Nicholas’s Day. Like the Christkind, he instead delivered them on Christmas Day. Which definitely made him the Christmas Man. Definitely, definitely, definitely not St Nicholas. Nope. All similarities to St Nicholas were entirely coincidental. Definitely.
“Bad Santas and Other Creepy Christmas Characters” is available now from Simon & Schuster. The image above was lying about on my hard drive and I’ve completely forgotten where I got it from. If it belongs to you then drop me a line and I’ll amend this to give you credit.
Filed under Bad Santas Advent Calendar
In Norway and Sweden 13 December is St Lucia’s Day. St Lucia is represented as a beautiful young woman and the day is marked by a procession. A local girl is selected to play the saint. She dresses in white with a red sash and wears a crown of candles on her head. She will parade through the town followed by a series of similarly white-clad girls, each clutching one candle and singing songs dedicated to the saint.
Although St Lucia (or St Lucy) is indeed a historical saint, this is actually a relatively recent celebration which began in Sweden in the eighteenth or nineteenth century. But Norway actually celebrated a Lucia (or Lussi) centuries earlier, albeit in a very different form. For the night before 13 December was the Lussinatta or Lucy Night. This was the night when evil spirits and demons rose up to wander the Earth.
In these wanderings, Lussi was a hideously evil she-demon with magical powers. She was said to ride through the skies on a broomstick accompanied by demons, evil spirits and trolls, spreading mayhem and chaos wherever she went. Children needed to be good and the adults needed to ward off evil by protecting their homes with the sign of the cross. Otherwise Lussi would make her move – destroying property, crops or livestock, and kidnapping or killing misbehaving children.
“Bad Santas and Other Creepy Christmas Characters” by Paul Hawkins is available now and published by Simon & Schuster. I’m not really sure where the picture comes from and feel slightly guilty about purloining it but it seemed rather good for what I wanted…
Filed under Bad Santas Advent Calendar
One of the major reasons why the banning of Christmas failed in England was because the threat of abolition caused people of the seventeenth century to fight for their right to continue the traditions they had developed. Many writers even tried to find a character who embodied these Christmas traditions and could be used to appeal for their safekeeping. Writers of the seventeenth century were not masters of subtlety – probably because large segments of the public were illiterate, so books had a limited reach, and playwrights knew that drunken audiences would talk and heckle through most of their plays, so needed constant reminders of what was going on. Ben Jonson’s 1616 play Christmas, His Masque features a group of allegorical brothers and sisters with names like Minced Pie, Carol, Mumming, Wassail and Misrule, and he then introduces their father. The father is an old man with a beard who bemoans the fact he is being excluded from Christmas celebrations and implores the audience to keep the traditions alive in the face of growing opposition.
This is an early appearance of a character who would soon be featuring in mummers’ plays, stories and newspaper articles everywhere and over the next few hundred years would come to be a ubiquitous figure. He was a character who came to embody the secular irreligious Christmas traditions that the Puritans despised, but perhaps it was only because of the Puritan opposition that he ever developed at all. His name was Father Christmas.
“Bad Santas and Other Creepy Christmas Characters” by Paul Hawkins is published by Simon & Schuster and is available now.
Filed under Bad Santas Advent Calendar
The Karakoncolos appears in Bulgaria, Turkey, and Serbia and takes slightly different forms in each country but generally resembles a cross between the Devil and a sasquatch. In Turkey, his behaviour often involves standing on street corners on winter nights waiting for passers-by and asking them riddles. If the traveller gives an answer that includes the word ‘black’ then the Karakoncolos lets them go on their way. But if the passer-by fails to use that word, or indeed fails to answer at all, the Karakoncolos strikes them dead with a single blow. Sometimes his behaviour is more that of a trickster who takes the form of a woman or young girl and appears at people’s doors to con his way inside to be given food. Once inside the Karakoncolos feels compelled to imitate his host’s behaviour. One way of getting rid of him is to set fire to some silk or thread. The Karakancolos will respond in kind by setting his own fur on fire and, upon realising what he has done, will run from the house screaming to find water.
Sometimes the Karakoncolos turns up at people’s houses for more sinister reasons. They sometimes use their powers of disguise to pretend to be a loved one and lure the householder out into the snow. Once outside, the person finds themselves caught in a trance unable to move. They stand there frozen to the spot until the cold takes over and they wind up freezing to death. Another favourite trick of the creature in parts of Serbia is to sneak into houses and linger behind the doorways of children’s bedrooms. As the child goes through the doorway the Karakoncolos stretches out a hand and grabs the child by the neck before dragging them off to eat.
The Karakoncolos did not always kill its victims, however – particularly in Serbia it is known to use humans as its own personal taxi service. They again lure victims outside before placing them under a spell and leaping onto their back and forcing their captive to ferry them wherever they want to go. The exhausted person is only released at dawn.
Bad Santas and Other Creepy Christmas Characters by Paul Hawkins is available now from Simon & Schuster.
Filed under Bad Santas Advent Calendar
The Christkind (or Christ Child) was an impressively literal creation. Quite simply, it was the baby Jesus, freshly out of his manger and clad in white, who went round Germany and other Lutheran territories delivering gifts to children. The idea was that this was a spiritual figure who would teach children the true meaning of Christmas.
There were several problems with this.
The first one was a literal one. The baby Jesus was born on Christmas Day. And delivered the presents on Christmas Eve. This meant that somehow or other, the baby had to either pop out of Mary’s womb pre-birth for a quick bit of gift-giving or somehow, post-birth, travel back in time twenty-four hours and then travel round the world handing out gifts. Before being able to eat or speak. Even for a miracle-worker it made very little sense.
Secondly, the whole thing was a bit hard to visualise. How on earth does a baby deliver gifts? Between the inability to walk and the inability to carry things, it seemed doomed from the off.
Thirdly, the whole appeal – and admittedly terror – of St Nicholas was that he burst into the room in full view of everyone and made a public show of bringing the gifts. Obviously this required an adult family member or neighbour to play St Nicholas and visit children. Clearly the same could not happen for the Christkind. An adult turning up dressed as a baby would have been unconvincing and strangely unfestive. So the tradition had to be rewritten so that the Christkind appeared in the dead of night whilst all children were asleep and delivered the presents incognito.
Fourthly, the Lutherans made a fundamental miscalculation. Moving the present-giving from 6 December to Christmas Day might help increase the significance of Christmas Day but it also increased the significance of giving presents on Christmas Day. Ultimately Luther’s plan to popularise giving gifts at Christmas instead of other times served to, well, popularise giving gifts at Christmas. The Lutherans basically managed to accidentally invent the very focus on the material side of Christmas that they were trying to destroy!
Bad Santas and Other Creepy Christmas Characters by Paul Hawkins is available now from Simon & Schuster. The image at the top of the page is available under a Creative Commons license.
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To some, Black Peter was simply a brutal Moorish servant that St Nicholas had acquired. To others he was Satan himself, who had been captured and subjugated by St Nicholas and compelled to do his bidding. What was certain was that he was both vicious and single-minded in his determination to punish misbehaving children. A beating from Black Peter was said to be far more severe and brutal than any discipline the child had ever received before. If a child sufficiently angered St Nicholas for him to demand that Black Peter take the child away in his sack then the child would be trapped in Hell for an entire year, only getting the chance to repent the following Christmas.
Early depictions of Black Peter saw performers portray him by blacking their hands and faces with soot. This is certainly politically incorrect and a bit tasteless by modern standards. However – if you accept the idea of Black Peter being the Devil rather than a Moorish servant – the similarities to the image of someone ‘blacking up’ could be dismissed as an unfortunate coincidence. In the Middle Ages there was no universally accepted idea of what the Devil looked like but he was often depicted as being black in colour, perhaps because he was perceived as an evil figure strongly associated with shadows and darkness.
The nineteenth century saw a change in how Black Peter was portrayed. This was the time when Christmas experienced a major renaissance during which many medieval traditions were reinvented with a modern twist. It was also the height of colonialism and centuries of slaving trading had ensured non-white people were seen as inferior to Europeans, perhaps even less than human, and certainly ripe for mocking and satire. The person playing Black Peter began to take things a bit further and created the image hat largely remains to this day. Not only would the performer blacken all visible skin but he also donned pink lipstick and an Afro wig and wore garish jewellery. His behaviour and demeanour was fierce and primal and he was presented as a violent ‘untamed savage’, bound up with chains and clearly subservient to St Nicholas, his dominant ‘master’.
Critics of the character argue that such an overtly racial image is a throwback to the days of slavery and colonialism. They believe the clear stereotyping in Black Peter’s appearance can only be a symbol of racism that both offends and excludes the black population that makes up a sizable part of the country today.
Many modern-day Dutch people are keen to preserve the tradition of Zwarte Piet and insist that they are preserving existing traditions rather than attempting to cause racial offence, explaining that the character is black because he is covered in soot from climbing up and down chimneys. However, it is very difficult to disassociate his appearance from similar racial caricatures such as minstrels and golliwogs and it is extremely difficult to believe prejudice played no part in how his image was created in the nineteenth century.
In 2011 the former Dutch colony of Suriname banned depictions of Zwarte Piet in public and the same year Amsterdam city councillor Andrée Van Es became the first high-profile politician to publicly denounce the character. Attempts have also been made to portray Peter in different-coloured make-up such as blue, green and yellow. Nonetheless, the traditions have proved hard to shake off. Van Es was heavily criticised by Dutch traditionalists and an experiment by Dutch public broadcasters NPS to portray a rainbow-coloured Peter lasted only a year before he reverted back to his blackface origins. Meanwhile, the Dutch community in Vancouver were so vexed by the controversy over their use of Zwarte Piet in their annual Christmas celebrations in 2011 that local authorities decided to cancel them entirely, rather than make the decision to phase out the character. For now, however, Peter still appears in his blackface guise to play a major part in Christmas celebrations in the Netherlands itself.
“Bad Santas and Other Creepy Christmas Characters” is published by Simon & Schuster and available now. The illustration is by Mel Four and is taken from the book.
Filed under Bad Santas Advent Calendar
St Nicholas – or Sinterklaas as the Dutch call him – would arrive at households on 5 December, the eve of St Nicholas’s Day, and test children on their knowledge of scripture. Prior to his visit, children would try to memorise the Bible for hours in their desperation to pass the tests he would set them. And for good reason – passing the test might mean being rewarded with sweets and treats but failure could cost them their soul. Nowadays a visit to Santa Claus is a wonderful and magical experience where they meet a jolly, warm, friendly character who sits children on his knee[1], jovially asks if they have been naughty or nice and merrily gives them a Christmas present, chuckling all the time. In contrast, the Sinterklaas of the Dutch Middle Ages was a severe, threatening religious autocrat who preached fire and brimstone, judged children’s moral characters and threatened to damn them all to a lifetime in Hell. If children looked forward to his visits at all – and I’m not at all convinced that they did – their anticipation was mixed with a sense of fear and trepidation. This was a dress rehearsal for the day of judgement.
Sinterklaas would glare at the nervous children and, unsmiling, demand answers to questions on the Bible. If children knew the answers they would be handed sweets and warned to ensure they remained good for the following year. If children got a few questions wrong they would be soundly beaten. But if they had failed to learn anything at all they would be dragged off to Hell.
To understand the terror this instilled in children, it is important to remember that this was a time when Hell and eternal damnation were seen as very real threats for anyone who was not sufficiently pious and the role of a bishop or priest involved ensuring their flock was so terrified of the possibility of an afterlife of eternal torment that they would obey the Church without question. The visit of St Nicholas was an early test of a child’s devotion to the Lord and every child was terrified of failing his tests. Without his favour and protection, there was nothing to stop the devil taking them away. Children really, really did need to be good for goodness’ sake.
[1] Child safeguarding issues permitted.
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In December I will be doing a series of lectures in libraries around London to talk about “Bad Santas…”. Each lecture will be about 45 minutes long and will essentially be a (hopefully!) amusing and engaging history of how violent, bloody European folk tales of monsters that stalked the winter nights became santised and universalised in the form of Father Christmas.
The dates booked so far are here. More dates may yet be confirmed.
Friday 6th December – 7pm, Camberwell Library, 17-21 Camberwell Church St, London SE5 8TR
Saturday 7th December – 2pm, Muswell Hill Library, Queens Avenue, Muswell Hill, London, N10 3PE
Monday 9th December – 6:30pm, Maida Vale Library, Sutherland Avenue, London, W9 2QT
Tuesday 10th December – 6pm, Marylebone Library, 109-117 Marylebone Road, London, NW1 5PS
Thursday 12th December – 7pm Canada Water Library, 21 Surrey Quays Rd, London SE16 7AR
Saturday 14th December – afternoon but time tbc, Stroud Green & Harringay Library, Quernmore Road, London, N4 4QR
Monday 16th December – 6.30pm, John Harvard Library, 211 Borough High St, London SE1 1JA
If you’d like to come along then contact the libraries for admission detail.
I’ll also be guesting at the Comedy Club For Kids’ Santa Claus Science Experiment on the 15th and 22nd of December at the Bloomsbury Theatre (tickets available at the above link). The show also features Darren Hayman, Robin Ince, Tiernan Douieb, Nick Doody and a host of other performers. Tickets are available from the link above.
If you’d like to contact me about a lecture at an event near you, contact me on paulalexanderhawkins <at> gmail.com
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Of course, the aim of all I’ve discussed so far, is to end up with a publishing contract. And if and when you get one it’s a nice experience, albeit a very confusing one. So what do contracts contain?
Before I start discussing the contract, I want to make something clear. I am not an expert in understand publishing contracts. If you aren’t either, then make sure you get someone who does able to advise and negotiate for you. Hopefully this’ll be an agent but, if not, then it may be time to find a lawyer. But, in any case, make sure you get good advice on what you’re signing up to.
Bear in mind too that, if you do have an agent, you might find that a lot of the contract negotiation process passes you by as the agent discusses terms with the publishers and you’re left out of the loop somewhat. You’ll know early on what sort of advance you’re being offered but you might not hear much else until the contract’s agreed – potentially several weeks later. You will need to take your own view and how much you want to chase things and find out what’s going on. Personally I decided to trust that my agent knew what he was doing and let him get on with it and tell me when things were agreed but I’m sure several other people might want to be more hands-on – as might I in the future if I understand the process better! But patience is useful here.
Every contract is going to be a little different but I’ll try to answer some of the basic questions from a writer’s perspective in Q and A form.
a) What’s an advance?
An advance is an amount of money the publisher offers you to secure the book. It’s called an advance as publishers treat it as part of your future royalties (i.e. the money you get paid for book sales). So, if you get an advance of, say, £10, 000, the publisher won’t pay you any more money for sales until you’re owed more than £10l 000.
With a non-fiction book, the advance usually comes in three stages. You get part of it on signing, a part of it when you submit the manuscript and part of it when the book gets published.
Bear in mind that, particularly in big publishing companies, the advance needs to be processed and signed off by a few different departments at each stage – so it can take a couple of weeks after each of these milestones for the money to land in your account – it’s best not to plan your finances on the basis that you’ll get the money the second the contract gets signed!
Also remember that your advance is treated as a form of income – i.e. you will need to register as self-employed and pay tax on it. Forgetting that could land you with a big bill later!
b) So will there be an advance?
I certainly hope so! If there’s a bidding war then there’ll definitely be an advance and it could get rather high. If not, there’ll be a slightly more modest amount of money. For Bad Santas I received roughly the equivalent of a few months’ salary for the job I had at the time – and, as that job was not very secure, I did in fact quit and very much treat the advance like a salary that enabled me to go to work as a writer every day.
If you’re not being offered an advance, then it raises questions about the resources the publisher has available and how confident they feel about your book. Whether you should proceed probably depends on whether you think you can get interest elsewhere and how desperate you are to be published. If you’re going to write the book anyway then it won’t do any harm. If you’re trying to write it to make a living you should maybe consider pitching other ideas. Never ever pay money to be published. If someone’s asking you to do that, they’re either running a scam or a pretty crummy business but, either way, it’s unlikely they’ll have the money or the will to promote your work.
c) How much do I get paid per book?
A % of the recommended retail price This might be graded in stages – so 10% for the first x copies, 12.5% for the next x copies and so forth.
d) What happens if I don’t finish the book, or the book doesn’t get published?
If you don’t complete the book then you’ll probably have to pay back the initial advance that the publisher paid you. The second payment is subject to submitting the book along the lines of the proposal you made to the publisher. As long as you submit something that follows the theme, argument and chapter structure then, once you’ve submitted that, your first part of the advance is safe and you get the second par of the advance too. If the book doesn’t get published then you keep the first two parts of the advance but won’t get the third part. Which is a good reason to ensure you make what you submit as good as possible!
e) How long will the book need to be?
The publisher should discuss this with you and, if not, then the contract will state a number. A non-fiction book’ll probably be 50, 000 to 100, 000 words depending on the subject.
I realise that this is very brief and there are many more questions but most of them will depend on the individual contract. If you do have a general question, feel free to ask me and I’ll answer it as best I can but bear in mind I am no expert here!
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Paul Hawkins 