Hi and welcome to ‘a handful of history’, my fortnightly sharing of real-life stories from around the world. All the narratives I pick are rooted in history one way or another, yet I feel that most of them carry themes and happenings that seem very present day-like. I create this blog out of love and curiosity for the field of human history and culture, and I’m happy that you find it interesting too. My blog and newsletters are free; if you want to help me keep it going, please join my newsletter. THANK YOU. Thanks for being here - let's dive in. Enjoy! Majken xx
Merry Christmas & Happy New Year!
Sending out this last blog post in 2021, I wish you and your loved ones a wonderful Christmas and - not least - a Happy New Year!! May all of your wishes come true in 2022. Yeah, we could use a bit of magic these days, right!
On a personal note, I wish to say that I am most grateful that you are following my blog send-outs - THANK YOU! It means a lot to me. Also, thanks to all of you who’ve sent me a personal greeting over the season; it’s truly great hearing from you.
Let’s keep in touch. The next season starts March 3rd, and as always, all the articles and stuff will circle around ‘history told in creative ways’ one way or another.
Until then - Majken xx
Cave Life for Beginners
When he was 36 years old, Millican Dalton (1867-1947), an employee in the insurance business in the City of London, gave up his job. The stressing big-city life was not for him. Instead, he decided to head for the hills of the Lake District in Cumbria in northwest England. Here he settled down in a cave, and for the next fifty years, this was his home.
In the cave, Dalton lived an alternative lifestyle as a vegetarian, teetotaller and pacifist. Also, he set himself up as a mountain guide before the term was even a thing, and he hosted men - and women, which was a bit of a shock at the time - in his ‘cave hotel’.
“I was a clark in a London office. I felt stifled. Day after day I went to the office at the same time, but this was not the life for me. I longed to be free. I gave up my job in the commercial world and set out to seek romance and freedom. Ever since I’ve camped out. Today I live rentfree, ratefree, taxfree. It’s the only kind of life worth living.”
Millican Dalton, "Cave Life for Beginners".
Fascinated by Dalton’s way of living and curious to find out how it is actually to live in a cave, the British journalist Ben Cottam sets out to find Dalton’s place in the Lake District. He is joined by the psychiatrist and fellow Dalton enthusiast Giles Story. In the radio program “Cave Life for Beginners”, the two Brits investigate Dalton’s cave and why living in a cave has attracted human beings through history.
“Caves have long been a source of inspiration to artists, writers, poets and prophets, but what precisely is it that inspires?” Cottam asks. “Is it the dark or the smell, the disorientation or the discomfort? Why do hermits seek the solitary life within nature’s dark rooms? And what has this to do with inspiration? Can caves induce euphoria? Mania? Visions?” To get some answers, Cottam interviews an actor, a writer, an archaeologist, a professor, and a musician who all have experiences with cave life.
Kukeri
In case you happen to be in the countryside of Bulgaria around New Year and before Lent (which, in Christian religions, are the 40 days before Easter), you’d probably see some of the local men dressed up like the ones in the photos by Aron Klein I’ve placed above and below.
With their bodies covered by skin or cloth, their faces hidden behind masks, and large bells attached to their belts, the Bulgarian males are transformed into “Kukeris”. They walk and dance through the villages to scare away evil spirits and help provide a good harvest, health, and happiness, using the magic sound from the bells and the scary looks from the costumes. At the end of the parading, the Kukeris usually gather at the village square, where they dance wildly and amuse the people. The photographer Aron Klein witnessed one of these performances when he was working in the Rhodope Mountains located between Bulgaria and Greece. He was so fascinated by how these tiny villages celebrated their ancient cultural practices that he got the idea to create his remarkable ‘Kukeri’ photo series.
Before stumbling upon Klein’s photos, I’d never heard about the Bulgarian Kukeri-tradition (I’d love to try one of those costumes on!). When diving a little deeper into the phenomenon, I found a few exciting things on the subject. Like this website with animations on Bulgarian folklore - who’d have thought such a thing existed?! I’m impressed. There’s even a short animation video about the origin of Kukeri, quite entertainingly explained (see below).
The Haunted Hotel
“Heeeere’s Johnny!” The struggling writer and recovering alcoholic, Jack Torrance, takes up a position as an off-season caretaker of the historic Overlook Hotel in the Colorado Rockies. He brings his family with him, including his young son Danny who possesses "the shining", an array of psychic abilities that allow him to see the hotel's horrific past. A short while into their stay, a winter storm leaves the family snowbound. Soon hereafter, supernatural forces inhabiting the hotel start to negatively influence Jack's sanity - putting his wife and son in great danger.
In 1977, Stephen King wrote the book “The Shining”, which was later adapted into a film by Stanley Kubrick (an adaption Stephen King himself wasn’t very fond of, apparently). If you ever wondered how King got the inspiration to write this novel, the podcast “History Uncovered” can provide you with some answers. I listened in on the show, and I discovered that the Stephen King episode wasn’t just about the writer and The Shining. The most exciting part, I think, (i.e. the part where the true spookiness begins) is when the podcast dives into the story about the real-life hotel that King uses as his reference: The Stanley Hotel.
In October 1974, King and his wife Tabitha spent a night at the Stanley Hotel, situated at the foot of the Colorado Rockies. The podcast explains how the hotel was about to close for the season, leaving King and his wife as its sole guests. After eating in a grand yet empty dining room — with the chairs up on every table except his — and after walking through the endless empty hallways, a new novel began to take shape in King’s mind. “I got up, lit a cigarette, sat in the chair looking out the window at the Rockies”, Stephen King remembers, “and by the time the cigarette was done, I had the bones of the book firmly set in my mind.”
But King wasn’t only inspired by the empty winter hotel feeling that surrounded him. There was also the story about the Stanley Hotel itself, about the place being haunted.
In 1911 a young girl who worked at the hotel was seriously injured in room no. 217 from a gas explosion, the host of the podcast explains. The girl survived, but she kept returning to this exact spot as a ghost after her death. When King and his wife stayed at the Stanley Hotel, they (of course) ended up in room 217, and what happened…well that you’ll have to hear in the podcast ;-)
Weird Christmas
It’s December and time to bring on some Christmassy stuff - Yay! In my search, I stumbled upon the “Weird Christmas” podcast and blog created by Craig Kringle. Since 2013 he’s been diving into stories, music, and all kinds of phenomena that have to do with Christmas - but only the stuff that has a weird twist to it, as the name reveals.
“Christmas is weird. It used to be even weirder. This is proof.” Kringle writes on his page. And by looking through all the things he’s gathered over the years, I have to agree.
There’s an episode explaining how “Santa is a Mushroom”, and there’s the “Frog Murder Christmas” episode. There’s an episode on how jellyfish are related to the Christmas season, and then there’s one on “Dead Bird Christmas cards” (see photo below), which apparently was a trend handing out in the late 1800s. Perhaps it was rooted in a tradition from Northern Ireland where little boys on the first day after Christmas chased and killed birds and then put them on the top of a pole and decorated it with ribbons or coloured paper. Or perhaps it was out of sympathy and pity for the poor children who froze to death during the cold winter, Kringle suggests.
The Weird Christmas podcast also dives into different ways of celebrating Christmas and tops it with Christmas beliefs and (spooky) stories from all over the world. There are tellings of Werewolves that people “really used to believe were a thing”, according to the Christmas expert and co-host, Benito Cereno. There’s a vintage ghost story - “Between the Lights” - by the English novelist E.F. Benson. And then there is “The Yule Lads and Icelandic Christmas” episode. In Iceland, we are told, they don’t stick with just one Santa Claus. No, up there north, they have the merry - but mischievous - Icelandic Yule Lads, who take turns visiting kids on the 13 nights leading up to Christmas Eve. The children will place a shoe on the windowsill, and each of those nights, one Yule Lad will stop by and either leave candy (for the well-behaved boys and girls) or rotting potatoes (for the not-so-well-behaved children). Today the Yule Lads are known for the harmless tricks they like to play, but it wasn’t always so. Back in time they used to be a lot more creepy, so creepy that in 1746 parents were officially banned from tormenting their kids with stories about these Yule creatures. The stories had simply grown way too scary.
The Weird Christmas podcast has a bit of everything in the weird department, as you can see. Of the handful of episodes I’ve been listening to, one of my favourites was - ironically - the episode that (at first glance) had the least to do with Christmas: “Christmas, Buddhism, and Brad Warner”. In this episode, the author and Zen Buddhist, Brad Warner, explains how Zen Buddhism can teach you how to cope with Christmas (and with life in general) if you find it a little tricky.
A Visit from St. Nicholas
When listening in on the audio version of “A Literary Christmas” - a collection of short Christmas stories by some of the prominent classical writers such as Charles Dickens, Jane Austen, Rudyard Kipling, Thomas Hardy, and more - you get a feeling that you’ve been placed right next to a cosy crackling fire. You are wearing your pyjama, a thick pair of socks and your favourite sweater, and when you turn your head and look out the window, all you see is crystal white snow that lights up the dark December night (next, you pour yourself a cup of hot chocolate …or mulled wine, and then you feed the fire a few extra pieces of wood). “A Literary Christmas” is a journey back to the good old (but tough) days. It taps into the very heart of Christmas you may say with all its cosiness and nostalgia. Also, it is narrated brilliantly by the two actors Juliet Stevenson and Simon Callow.
One of the texts in the anthology is the poem “A Visit from St. Nicholas” which - perhaps? - is written by the American writer and Professor Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863). Stevenson’s reading of it captured me, and when looking a little closer into the background of the text, I discovered that there is quite an exciting story to it.
On December 23, 1823, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” was published anonymously in a local newspaper in the city of Troy, New York. It soon became rather popular and was reprinted frequently after that. A reason why the poem caught on was probably because of how it offered a different take on Santa Claus than what people had been used to. Until that time, Santa was traditionally depicted as “a thinner, less jolly, horse-riding disciplinarian, a combination of mythologies about the British Father Christmas, the Dutch Sinterklaas, and the fourth-century bishop Saint Nicholas of Myra.”
But “A Visit from St. Nicholas” painted a different picture. Here was a Santa who could magically sneak in and out of homes via chimneys, a cheerful little old man with twinkling eyes, and a little round belly “That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly”. He had eight reindeers who were pulling his sleigh, and he’d even given every one of them a name: Dasher, Dancer, Prancer, and Vixen, Comet, Cupid, Donder and Blitzen.
As the poem spread and became more popular, there was still no name attached to it. Actually, it was not until more than a decade after the first publishing that Clement Clarke Moore took credit for the verses. It is said that he wasn’t too proud of being associated with the unscholarly writing - he was, after all, an erudite professor and had a certain reputation to uphold!
According to Moore, he had composed the poem only to give to his children (his inspiration had landed on a snowy winter's day during a shopping trip on a sleigh). And when it came to it, it wasn’t him but a friend of his who’d sent in the poem to the newspaper in the first place. But…was it really Moore who’d written the verses? Or was it indeed penned by the New York writer Henry Livingston? Many people had started to believe exactly this, and in the year 1900 - years after Henry Livingston himself had passed away - his family went public claiming that their ancestor was the original writer and that he should have the credit. Since then, the question has been repeatedly raised and argued by experts on both sides.
However, no matter who did (and did not) put these lines together, “A Visit from St. Nicholas” has been trendy ever since it was published. It has laid out the foundation for how the modern popular edition of Santa Claus is pictured, it is believed. Some has even called it "arguably the best-known verses ever written by an American”.
A Visit from St. Nicholas
'Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house Not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse; The stockings were hung by the chimney with care, In hopes that St. Nicholas soon would be there;
The children were nestled all snug in their beds, While visions of sugar-plums danced in their heads; And mamma in her ’kerchief, and I in my cap, Had just settled our brains for a long winter’s nap,
When out on the lawn there arose such a clatter, I sprang from the bed to see what was the matter. Away to the window I flew like a flash, Tore open the shutters and threw up the sash.
The moon on the breast of the new-fallen snow Gave the lustre of mid-day to objects below, When, what to my wondering eyes should appear, But a miniature sleigh, and eight tiny reindeer,
With a little old driver, so lively and quick, I knew in a moment it must be St. Nick. More rapid than eagles his coursers they came, And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name;
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now, Prancer and Vixen! On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donder and Blitzen! To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall! Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!”
As dry leaves that before the wild hurricane fly, When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky; So up to the house-top the coursers they flew, With the sleigh full of Toys, and St. Nicholas too.
And then, in a twinkling, I heard on the roof The prancing and pawing of each little hoof. As I drew in my head, and was turning around, Down the chimney St. Nicholas came with a bound.
He was dressed all in fur, from his head to his foot, And his clothes were all tarnished with ashes and soot; A bundle of Toys he had flung on his back, And he looked like a pedler just opening his pack.
His eyes—how they twinkled! his dimples how merry! His cheeks were like roses, his nose like a cherry! His droll little mouth was drawn up like a bow And the beard of his chin was as white as the snow;
The stump of a pipe he held tight in his teeth, And the smoke it encircled his head like a wreath; He had a broad face and a little round belly, That shook when he laughed, like a bowlful of jelly.
He was chubby and plump, a right jolly old elf, And I laughed when I saw him, in spite of myself; A wink of his eye and a twist of his head, Soon gave me to know I had nothing to dread;
He spoke not a word, but went straight to his work, And filled all the stockings; then turned with a jerk, And laying his finger aside of his nose, And giving a nod, up the chimney he rose;
He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle, And away they all flew like the down of a thistle, But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight, "Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good-night.”
Clement Clarke Moore (1779-1863)
Illustrations by F.O.C. Darley.