The Suburban Times

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Across the Fence: The Wild Hunt

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Today, I am starting this new column, and I will chat to you in a neighborly fashion across the fence. But I also would like to invite you to hop across your fence to discover and explore all kinds of things and places. Let’s start with something that is as current as it gets.

You may think that today is just another day in the first week of January. You are right – to most people that’s exactly it. But not to everybody. Because in ancient European folklore it’s the time of the Wild Hunt, and in my childhood, I happened across more than one old neighbor who still believed in it. Or rather obeyed the rules that went along with the old tale.

When I was about seven years old, we shared a drying room in the basement of our apartment house. Dryers were not as common as they are these days – and so we did a lot of line-drying. That morning after New Year’s Day way back when, my mother had washed a load of white laundry. And she had hung it to dry when she ran into the old woman who lived next door on the same floor as we did.

According to old European lore, doing the laundry before January 6 brings you bad luck. (Photo: Vidar Nordli-Mathison/images.unsplash.com)

“You did your laundry before January 6?!” she asked my mother, eyes wide and her voice a bit wobbly. “I never do. The Wild Hunt …”

My mother was obviously never superstitious; she believed in hygiene over malicious ghosts. So, she continued her chores that day. She knew neither good luck nor bad would come to our family due to doing the laundry in a 20th century apartment house. But the episode stuck with me. And I had my mother explain to me what it was about the white laundry and the Wild Hunt. Here is the story.

In the ancient days when the year was counted in lunar months, a year only had 354 days. But in order to be consistent with a solar year, you had to add 11 days to the calendar, also called “dead” days, or twelve nights. These days that were not accounted for by the lunar calendar were, of course, a source of superstition. Allegedly during this time nature’s law was unhinged, and the border between the dead and the living was down. The Wild Hunt were the haunted spirits of murdered people or ones that had committed suicide and who flew through the night along with hordes of horses and hounds. Imagine the roaring sounds and the darkness of medieval winter nights, and you get the basis for a horror tale of the finest kind. Midnight of Twelfth Night or January 6 ended the sinister magic.

The most important of the twelve nights (in Germany they are thought of as “rough nights”) were spent indoors, fasting and in prayer. Clothes lines were not hung during the entire twelve nights unless the Wild Hunt would get entangled in them and might steal a person’s soul. And woe to the person who had hung a white sheet! That sheet might get stolen and turned into a shroud for its owner in the upcoming year. White underwear hung on a clothes line might lure the evil spirits to wreak havoc with the women it belonged to. Of course, back in those ages nobody would have wanted to hang clothes outdoors in any nightly storm. The wind might have blown off the costly linen, and that would have meant bad luck in itself. Think of the costly loss!

Remembering that occurrence in my childhood, I’m chuckling softly. Our drying room was storm-proof, for sure, and I know that anybody who wasn’t lying directly on the ground outside the house and taking a peek through the window wouldn’t have seen any laundry at all. Of course, wicked spirits might have had their own means of spotting white laundry in the basement of a 20th century apartment house. If you believe in such spirits in the first place.

Comments

  1. I enjoyed your new column very much.
    I did not know about the 12 days but my family always said you should never have laundry hanging on Sylvester (New Years Eve) going into Neujahr (New Year) I make sure that i don’t.

    • Thank you, Brigitte! Well, now you know you may do as much laundry as you like if you don’t believe in those spirits 😉

  2. Congratulations Susanne on your new column. Love your observations on Life in the South Sound with your global perspective and small town living. .it is great to have you share. Thanks

    • Thank YOU, Ricardo! This new column will take a much roader view on things than my column “Home from Home”, but also will look into more details as well, as you will see. Hope you enjoy!

  3. The lunar calendar and accounting of years has always intrigued me. My wife, born in Korea, had her birthday officially accounted for in Korea on the lunar calendar date (27 July) which was a different date on the western Gregorian calendar (1 September). Not only that, but each year the lunar birthdate falls on a different Gregorian calendar day due to the shifting discrepancy between the two calendars: this year it’s 27 August. Clever as she is, she parlayed this into three birthdays a year! The lunar date of birth…..the Gregorian date of birth…..and annual changing of lunar birth date in current Gregorian calendar. After a few years of marriage I got wise to the game.

      • Let me reply with a brief laundry story from another coast and another time and culture. I grew up in Norfolk, Virginia, in the 1950s. We had stories and rituals for everything. The pertinent one was NO LAUNDRY ON SUNDAY! So sacred did local Christians— was there anyone else?— hold the sabbath that doing any labor on Sunday— was there any other holy day?— offended, not only God, who for his part was mightily silent on the subject, but your neighbors, who were not. Hang out a load of laundry and you’d hear about it, behind your back certainly, but often to your face! My mother knew the ropes and when not to use them, so we were never singled out as blatant heathen, though as owners of a tavern with Sunday hours, we were presumed so my many. A new family down the street was not up on local expectations and put out a colorful line full of foreign flag-wear into the Sunday breezes, all unknowing. They promptly got a visit from a little committee of concerned neighbors. The poor woman from that godless household could be seen hurriedly gathering in a soggy mass of disrespectful clothes. My mother invited her over for coffee.

        • Actually, this doesn’t strike me as strange at all. In Germany, we still hold to a lot of Sunday rules.
          I attach another article from a former column of mine that tells you about some of the customs in the very beginning.

          I’m pretty sure that nobody there would send a commission to a person washing on a Sunday, of course. Except maybe in some more traditional rural areas. But mow your lawn, and you are really in trouble, even in a city …

          thesubtimes.com/2017/10/13/home-from-home-old-world-chimes/

  5. I really enjoyed reading this column. I spent many years living in Germany, and I’m always brought right back there when I read your columns.

    Have you considered applying for a Reader’s Voice column in the Tacoma News Tribune? I think the cut off is 11 Jan.

    • Thank you so very much, Judy!

      As a matter of fact, I have in the past offered the Tacoma News Tribune articles that they never even acknowledged to have received. And as The Suburban Times has always been such a reliable medium for my columns, the editor being such an author-friendly and helpful person, and readers have started to identify me with this platform, I am rather wary about changing up things.