Free The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year by Linda Raedisch Page A

it, or be griev-ously harmed by it. If you failed to take the proper precautions you might be struck blind, mad or even dead upon
    the passing of the Wild Rider and his ghostly retinue. At the very least, you could expect to spend several weeks in bed, recovering from the trauma.
    13. This was the season in which the Wild Hunt was most commonly perceived, but the Anglo-Saxon Chronicle reports that in 1127, reliable witnesses (read “monks”) in the area of Stamford both heard and saw the phantom hunting party go by with their black hounds and horses after February 6. The change in color is probably the result of Woden’s transformation from deity to demon.
    74 Riders on White Horses
    But there was also the possibility that you would be
    swept up, carried over the treetops and deposited in a
    strange land. In the mid-nineteenth century, a Norwe-
    gian farm boy claimed to have been briefly taken up by the Oskorei 14, as the Wild Hunt was sometimes known in Norway. None the worse for it, he lived to a great age, but all he could ever say of his adventure was that he had been taken to a place of splendor. Interestingly, the famous, feral Green Children of medieval East Anglia claimed to hail from “St.
    Martin’s Land,” where it was always twilight, the grass was always green, and the natives apparently ate only beans.
    According to a twelfth-century chronicler of wonders, the
    green-skinned children, a boy and a girl, had strayed into the village of St. Mary’s of the Wolf-Pittes, now Woolpits, by accident, through a fissure in the earth. Was St. Martin’s Land the same realm to which the Norwegian boy had been
    transported? Unfortunately, there is no one now living who can tell us.
    “Blacker than pitch”
    Another rider on a white horse, St. Nicholas, was of a kindlier bent. Sinterklaas, as he is known to the Dutch, starts rambling around the countryside in mid-November, well in
    advance of his feast day of December 6. Like Woden, Sin-
    terklaas is old and bearded, but instead of the floppy hat, he wears a bishop’s mitre. More importantly, he never goes 14. Oskorei comes from an Old Norse word meaning “terror,” but the Norwegians had plenty of other names for this phenomenon, including Asgardsrei , indicating that it issued from Asgard, the abode of the Norse sky gods, and Jolorei or “Yule Host.”
    When the witch Lussi rode at its head, it was called the Lussiferd .
    Riders on White Horses 75
    anywhere without his sidekick, Zvarte Piet or “Black Peter,”
    whose job it is to stuff naughty children in his sack and
    carry them off to Spain. (In the staunchly Protestant Netherlands of the sixteenth century, a trip to sunny Catholic Spain was akin to a sojourn in Purgatory.)
    In the Netherlands, Black Peter is St. Nicholas’ sole
    attendant. Dressed in brightly colored cap or turban, his
    puffed sleeves peeking out from the fashionable slashings in his velvet jacket, Black Peter resembles a Moorish page boy of sixteenth-century Spain. Today, few children are afraid of this colorfully anachronistic figure. Rather than terror, he provides the comic relief to the bishop’s solemn visit. Still, there can be no doubt that Black Peter has sprung from
    the same ageless bloodline as brasher devils like Čert and Krampus (whom we’ll meet in the next chapter) and perhaps even Snorri Sturluson’s pitch-black elves.
    While he resembles the medieval stereotype of “the
    Moor,” Piet’s Spanish/Moorish identity has been laid over
    one of those dark winter spirits who were already known to emerge from the forest in the wake of the Wild Rider. And
    Dutch children might tell you that there is another more
    obvious explanation for the page’s dark face: it is Black
    Peter’s job to go up and down the sooty chimneys to fill
    the children’s shoes so that St. Nicholas won’t soil his costly bishop’s robes.
    Recipe: Bishop’s Wine
    Bisschopswijn or Bishop’s Wine is drunk by the grown-ups on the feast day of St.