Welsh Christmas Traditions
Have Ancient Origins
By EIFION WILLIAMS
Traditional Christmas celebrations in Wales have come to be associated with the reminiscences of Dylan Thomas in A Child’s Christmas in Wales.
The scenes of sleeping uncles, tippling aunts, musical evenings and children’s games in the snow have probably not changed much since Dylan’s day.
They have become memorable because they are endearingly filtered by the poet through the innocent eyes of a young boy.
But in many rural parts of Wales ancient customs surrounding Christmas are still preserved, many of them derived from Celtic traditions.
The Christmas season happened to coincide with midwinter festivals when the Celtic world celebrated the annual miracle of death and rebirth, when evergreens like holly, mistletoe and ivy were brought into the house to represent nature’s continuity.
One of the ancient Celtic customs that has survived down to the present day and is believed to date back to pre-Roman times, is that of the Mari Lwyd, meaning the ‘Grey Mare’.
The tradition involves a group of merrymakers going from door to door singing and exchanging rhyming verses in a battle of wits with the people inside.
One of the party carries a horse’s skull, the Mari Lwyd, mounted on a pole and decorated with coloured ribbons and bells.
He is hidden under a sheet and manipulates the snapping jaw of the skull as the celebrants, usually in disguise, move from door to door. The group is eventually invited inside the house and the partying begins.
It is believed that the Mari Lwyd custom was used to celebrate the passing from the old to the new year and the return of the growing season. The horse would have been of the utmost importance to people at that time and the custom was believed to have been dedicated to the Celtic Horse Goddess Rhiannon.
The Mari Lwyd tradition was popular in Glamorgan and Monmouthshire, where several communities have kept the tradition alive. The best known is The Two Rivers Festival in the border town of Chepstow, where wassailers from England meet a Mari Lwyd party from Wales and proceed to celebrate into the night with a ceilidh.
Another unique Welsh tradition is Plygain, whose origins go back to the early Middle Ages. Men gathered by candlelight in the parish church on Christmas morning between 3 AM and 6 AM to sing carols, unaccompanied, and often of their own composition. (The women apparently stayed home preparing for the Christmas festivities.)
The plygain tradition is still carried on in many areas of rural Wales, although the services are now generally held on Christmas Eve and likely to involve the whole family. There has been renewed interest in recent years in the unique plygain carols composed over the centuries by local participants.
The ancient custom of gift-giving during the Christmas season can be traced back to Roman times and is preserved in Wales as calennig. Today, calennig largely refers to the practice of boys going around the neighbourhood on New Year’s morning wishing families well with a piece of verse and receiving a gift in return.
Originally, the calennig was an apple studded with nuts, raisins and an evergreen twig. It was presented on New Year’s morning to a lucky recipient who would then be blessed with good luck for the coming year.
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