The Christmas Tradition of Dumb Suppers

[rhysiana]

 or, Christmas used to be as spooky as Halloween and why did we allow that to go out of fashion?

Here's a thing I posted to Tumblr about this time last year, and it gained no traction there, I guess because the youths are all philistines who don't appreciate a good spooky seasonal alternative to the Ouija board? Anyway, umadoshi had a link to an article about how Christmas used to be associated with ghost stories, and it reminded me of this, so let's try this again with a potentially more appreciative audience.

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Who wants a super weird, Christmas-themed, historically-based soulmate/true love/future spouse divination AU idea? (I mean, clearly the real question here is who doesn’t. The world is a weird and wonderful place, my friends.)

I have this friend who does really detailed historical research of really random subjects, and she wrote this great overview article on the history of the connection between Christmas and the dead, the pagan roots of many Christmas traditions, and some of the odder ghost story/folk magic rituals that have been connected to Christmas. Here, I’m just going to pull out the bit about the tradition of dumb suppers.

This is not atypical of many old Christmas Eve tales, because the power to prophesy—something technically forbidden to Christians but often practiced nonetheless—also reached its height on Christmas Eve. The power to prophesy was supposed to be especially strong because this power, supposed to be peculiar to pre-Christians, was making a last-ditch resistance before being symbolically extinguished by the birth of Christ on Christmas morning. The supposed thinness of the veil between natural and supernatural must have been extremely tempting, perhaps even more so because Christians were not supposed to take advantage of it. There is no way to know how many people actually tried seriously to divine—or manipulate—the future on long-ago Christmas Eves, but there is certainly an abundance of stories about these activities, which suggests that fortune-telling was much on peoples’ minds.

By far the most popular of these practices were versions of the dumb-supper, wherein a girl would try to discover who her husband would be by setting a table for two in silence at an auspicious time, and awaiting a vision of the man she would marry. In Scandinavian, German, English and Scottish tales, stories of dumb-suppers are often (in Scandinavia, almost invariably) set on Christmas Eve. One thing many of them have in common is a dark twist to this seemingly benign practice; this may, however, be less a feature of their taking place on Christmas Eve than a feature of their being stories of dumb-suppers. Even in modern fiction, such stories often have sinister twist endings—see Henderson Starke’s (Kris Neville’s) “Dumb Supper” for one example.

One story from Sweden tells of a maidservant who stayed up late to keep vigil alone in the kitchen, hoping to see the man she would eventually marry. When the master of the house entered the kitchen to get a drink of water, she became so angry that he had broken the magic vigil that she threw a dish at him in fury and then went to bed. When she told her mistress the story the next morning, however, the mistress’s reply was simply, “I see how it will be.” The mistress died that year, and the master married the maidservant. Good fortune for the maid—but there is an unnerving note nonetheless in the indirect and unwelcome prophecy of the mistress’s death.

Clement Miles, writing in the early twentieth century, states that “among the southern Slavs, if a girl wants to know what sort of husband she will get, she covers the table on Christmas Eve, puts on it a white loaf, a plate, and a knife, spoon and fork, and goes to bed. At midnight, the spirit of her future husband will appear and fling the knife at her. If it falls without injuring her, she will get a good husband and be happy, but if she is hurt she will die early.” In Poland, diners would pull straws from under the tablecloth: “A green one foretold marriage; a withered one—waiting; a yellow one—spinsterhood; a very short one—an early grave.”

-excerpted from “DO NO HARM TO ME OR MINE”: THE HAUNTED HISTORY OF CHRISTMAS EVE by Marian Kensler, Strange Horizons December 2006

The section just before this one is about animals attaining the gift of speech for a limited time on Christmas Eve, with regional variation in the range of how twee to sinister that ability is. I personally found the whole thing fascinating, so I'd encourage you to read it all in full, but this bit in particular struck me as having interesting potential fic applications.

So there you go. Go forth, gentle writers, armed with this strange knowledge, and do what ye will.

Comments

[lettersfromeleanorrigby]

I love the ooky-spooky pagan stuff that is just beneath the cheap Christian veneer.

I read Susan Cooper's The Dark is Rising series when I was young and have ever since had a preoccupation with pagan midwinter ceremonies-- and insist on all those barely-Christian carols at Christmas, as well as enough greenery of various stripes to power pretty much any spell. : )

[rhysiana]

That series is one of my seasonal reread favorites, too! Especially the first one.

[lettersfromeleanorrigby]

Will Stanton breaks my heart every time, Bran Davies, too. I need to reread Greenwitch to give Jane Drew more attention.

[patelyne]

Okay I’m just going to say this - spooky Christmas sounds amazing and I’m offended that I had never heard about this before. How is this not huge still/again?

[rhysiana]

Right?! We need to bring this back!

[patelyne]

This could be the one thing that brings peace in the “Which is better? Halloween or Christmas?” Wars

[rhysiana]

[insert "Both. Both is good." gif]

[umadoshi]

That was a really neat read. ^_^ Thanks!

[rhysiana]

Yay! Glad you enjoyed it!

(This same friend also keeps a wordpress blog dedicated to reviewing books featuring fictional portrayals of Anne Boleyn, which she's managed to keep going for a frighteningly long time, and once wrote an article about attempting to trace the eventual historical fate of a woman accused of trying to murder someone with a piece of poisoned wedding cake. She writes the best weird articles, and I keep hoping she'll write more, but she keeps having children instead. So inconvenient.)

[mad_madam_m]

Oh, that is fascinating. I've often wondered what Christmas traditions were lost/fell out of fashion, because you have stories like "A Christmas Carol" that hint at a much creepier version of the holiday than what we have today.

(Is my brain trying to fic a dumb supper now? Of course it is, because it's something I can see Stiles OR Derek doing.)

[rhysiana]

Yeah, as soon as I saw that mention of the specifically Polish tradition at the end there, I was like, "Stiles would do this." I have half a beginning formed in my mind for that. But I want as many versions of fics based on this as possible!

(The article umadoshi linked to a few days ago was specifically about the ghost story link for "A Christmas Carol.")

[mad_madam_m]

I could also see it being a werewolf tradition, steeped in their own lore and connection to the moon and the supernatural (since Christmas Eve is only a few days after the winter solstice). Maybe for werewolves it's only if the full moon falls on Christmas Eve, they can set out a dumb supper and at midnight, they'll receive a vision of their mate...

...

...crap I really like this idea XD

[rhysiana]

Yessssss, do it! (I'm sure you don't have enough WIPs right now...)

[mad_madam_m]

While this is true, I also have a 12 Days of Sterek fic due... >.>

[rhysiana]

I'm looking forward to it!

[mad_madam_m]

I have 1200 words of this fic and it's still not done (although it's getting close). I'm torn between saying "this is all your fault" and "omfg THANK YOU" because this fic's due Thursday night. XD

[rhysiana]

Yesssssss. I am happy to accept all blame as an enabler. :-D