Every country that celebrates the yuletide season has its own weird way of expressing itself during the sacred holiday. Germans hang an ornamental pickle on their trees, and the Swedes build a giant Yule goat. In just about every culture during the season, though, there’s a horse. After all, they were present (at least a donkey was) at the manger, according to Renaissance artists. Horses are especially important in Wales at this time of year. Only the most notable tradition there doesn’t involve riding or the pulling of sleds. What the Welsh do is wear horse skulls like hats and go door-to-door, creeping the hell out of everybody.
The Welsh call their form of caroling Mari Lwyd, and it seems more appropriate as a Halloween activity than as a celebration of the birth of Christ. After decorating a horse skull with pretty ribbons, bows, baubles, and doodads, a band of singing Welsh folk approach the doors of town residents and sing in rhymes, requesting to come in. What ensues is a back-and-forth exchange called a pwnco; those inside the house are expected to sing something just as poetically witty (or more so) than the people outside the door. This goes on until everyone gets tired and wants a drink. It’s sort of a trick-or-treat situation, only instead of candy, the homeowner eventually has to open the door and hand out food and alcohol to the horse ghoul and his minions.
The Day of the Wren
Another Welsh tradition that involves both Christmas and creatures is Wren Day. For this nineteenth-century tradition, alternately called Day of the Wren and Hunt the Wren Day, every Twelfth Night (the last day of the yuletide season) a fake wren is stuck on the top of a decorated pole. The pole is then paraded through town, held aloft by people called mummers (also wrenboys or strawboys), who dress up in masks and suits made out of straw. Tragically, in the past the wren wasn’t fake, and the pole was more like a pitchfork. As the mummers came down the streets, begging for money in song, they would hand out (presumably bloody) feathers from the bird as good luck charms. Providing even further evidence that the Welsh have some significant confusion as to the difference between Christmas and Halloween.
Like many traditions of this sort, the exact reason why people started terrorizing their neighbors with singing horse zombies remains shrouded in mystery. It is, however, pretty safe to assume that there’s some very old religion in there somewhere.
With all the free food and booze being handed to the participants, the members of the Mari Lwyd have been known to transform from a band of merry revelers to an unruly and annoying mob. The fact that they visit pubs as much as houses doesn’t help matters much. In some areas of Wales they have such a good time that they haul out the skull for New Year’s Eve as well, pestering passersby on the street with their liquor-fueled, barnyard demon shenanigans. Yet despite the complaints of heathenry and public drunkenness that have been lodged for hundreds of years, the poetry-battling livestock phantom continues to endure.
How to Make Your Own Seasonal Abomination
Should you happen to have a horse skull just lying around the house, or know how to acquire one without breaking any local laws, here are the official instructions from the website of Cardiff’s swank Exchange Hotel, so that you can make your very own horrifying Mari Lwyd:
“A horse’s skull (real or custom made)
Two large glass marbles or baubles
Fake ears
Ribbons for the mane
A white sheet to cover the carrier’s body
A broomstick to support the skull above your head”
Once you have the materials, stuff the marbles/baubles into the eye sockets, use the ribbons to make a mane, and mount the skull onto the stick while ensuring the mouth can open and close. Then the person who’s the designated carrier gets to wear a sheet and perform their best interpretation of a horse ghost.
The Exchange Hotel does admit that this custom is a little creepy but argues that it also serves to “bring communities together at Christmas time.” Which, we assume, includes groups of children cowering in closets praying for Christmas to end before they get eaten by the monsters in the street.
