Our history would not be complete did we not denounce the pagan practices to which people in this country have for so long clung and which some seek to preserve in the name of “culture,” “folklore,” “custom,” or “tradition.” No good can come of such things.
Mummering in Newfoundland has long been a way of getting revenge for past grievances. There are many recorded instances of people disguised as mummers setting upon their enemies or religious rivals and beating them severely. (Mummers, for the information of those fortunate enough never to have encountered them, are revellers who go about at Christmas in disguise, wreak havoc in the streets, barge their way unannounced and uninvited into people’s homes and, until bribed with food and liquor and lewd dancing, will not leave.)
Take the case of one Isaac Mercer, who on December 28, 1860, is set upon and murdered by a troupe of mummers in Bay Roberts, after which mummering is outlawed in St. John’s, which only serves to increase its popularity.
How often have we thought of poor Isaac Mercer at the bottom of that scrum of mummers thinking it was all in fun. A friend described him in a newspaper as “a cheerful, optimistic sort of fellow upon whom fortune always shone and who, it seems, incurred the wrath of dozens without even knowing it. He was the kind of man who never suspected that anyone thought badly of him and probably did not know until the act was well under way that he was being murdered.”
We were once in our youth visited by mummers. There was a knock on the door, followed by the question “Any Christmas here?” The mummers spoke ingressively, that is while breathing in, in order to disguise their voices. My father consequently misheard the question and opened the door to assure his interlocutor that no one who was not a Christian ever set foot inside his house — and in they came.
They wore fearsome masks, animal-heads, or had their faces covered with veils of lace or net curtains. One had between its legs a stuffed stocking that was so long it dragged the ground.
Another of their number carried a stick to which was tied a bladder full of peas with which he went about whipping all those whom he deemed not to be in the Christmas spirit, for some reason focusing his attentions mainly on me. Never will I forget the loud rattle of the bladder as he chased me through the house from room to room.
He did thereby incite to pursuing me another member of the troupe known as the Horse-chops who rode a kind of hobby-horse, which consisted of a stick with the figure of a horse’s head on top, a head that had movable jaws with nails for teeth, which I heard snapping viciously behind me. All of this took place as though set to music, the balance of the troupe having holed up in the kitchen, from whence could be heard the horrible accordion, the spoons and some sort of dreadful drum.
Even as I cringed beneath my bed, just out of range of the bladder and the chops, I heard them sing ingressively their beguiling “The Terra Novean Exile’s Song”: “How oft some of us here tonight / Have seen the mummers out / As thro’ the fields by pale moon light / They come with merry shout/In costumes quaint with mask or paint…”
Mercifully, the mummers departed our house only minutes later, going next door, where the inhabitants, unable to repel them, affected pleasure at the sight of them to save themselves, and thus were stuck with them for a night throughout which, my father assured me, nothing sustained them but our prayers.