The Ghosts of Christmas Past
Christmas might seem like a time of jollity and cheer, but underneath all the tinsel and fairy lights there’s a far darker mood – one we see expressed in our modern custom of telling ghost stories at Christmas, in monsters like the Krampus, which roam the streets of European towns and cities across the Christmas season, and the horrible horse-skulled monster the Mari Lwyd who appears across Wales in the darkest nights of the year.
This talk will examine both the origins of these dark Christmas customs, and how they’ve changed and shifted down through the centuries – following everything from the hierarchy shredding Roman festival of Saturnalia to the custom of dressing as a monster and going house-to-house demanding drinks, food and money (the origins of modern Halloween trick-or-treating), and even the Christmas witches, who were said to riot through the skies with bands of the dead over the midwinter.
Speaker Bio
Sarah Clegg has a PhD in ancient history from Cambridge University and was part of the 2020/21 London Library Emerging Writers Programme. Her most recent book – The Dead of Winter: the Demons, Witches and Ghosts of Christmas– was published in 2024.
Curated & Hosted by
Marguerite Johnson is a cultural historian of the ancient Mediterranean, specialising in sexuality and gender, particularly in the poetry of Sappho, Catullus, and Ovid, as well as magical traditions in Greece, Rome, and the Near East. She also researches Classical Reception Studies, with a regular focus on Australia. In addition to ancient world studies, Marguerite is interested in sexual histories in modernity as well as magic in the west more broadly, especially the practices and art of Australian witch, Rosaleen Norton. She is Honorary Professor of Classics and Ancient History at The University of Queensland, and a Fellow of the Australian Academy of the Humanities. She lives in Mytilene on the Greek island of Lesvos.
Don’t worry if you miss it – we will send you a recording valid for two weeks the next day.
