The Folklore of Discworld

shadows, and the time when all the old year’s occult rubbish has piled up and must be cleared away, and the time for the largest, loudest feast of the year.
    The name ‘Hogswatch’ makes perfectly good sense for the Discworld, where the festive fare at midwinter is centred on pig-meat in one form or another – roast boar, pork joints, pork pies, sausages, hams, pigs’ heads, black puddings – and where the Hogfather, the seasonal gift-bringer, gallops across the skies in a sledge drawn by wild boars. This is a world where pigs (at least, certain special pigs on a certain special night) can and do fly. Oddly, in Scotland and northern England there is a rather similar-sounding name for New Year’s Eve, Hogmanay – a word which has been known since the sixteenth century, but which nobody has managed to explain. Moreover, British Methodists call Christmas Eve and New Year’s Eve the Watch Nights, and hold midnight services. There are parts of Europe (notably Romania, Serbia, Sweden and Norway) where roast pig or a pig’s head is the thing to eat at Christmas. All this surely proves that echoes of the great Discworld festival drifted across the dimensions and became fruitfully confused in receptive Earthly minds.
    Be that as it may, there is a good practical reason why midwinter feasting is so lavish – it’s the season for a mass slaughter of livestock. Why use up large amounts of fodder keeping all your animals alive through the winter? Come the spring, a single young healthy bull, ram and boar will be enough to service all your cows, ewes and sows. So, kill off the surplus males, and for once everyone can eat as muchfresh meat as they like, and then salt or smoke the rest, and with luck they’ll have enough to last all winter. Farmers have been doing this for thousands of years. The people who built Stonehenge, about 2500 BC, left enormous piles of half-eaten bones littering a village some two miles away – bones of cattle, and many, many pigs. The pigs’ teeth show they were young beasts, killed at about nine months old, just right for the winter solstice. And there were so many bones that people must have been gathering from miles around for this annual feast. Whatever its name may have been, it was the Hogswatch of its time.
    Very likely, it went on for more than just one night and day. There’s not much work needed on farms at midwinter, so why not spread the fun out for as long as possible? Many peoples have had this idea. The Ancient Romans managed to turn most of December into one long festive season. First came the Saturnalia, a period of five or six days of revelry beginning on 17 December and honouring Saturn, god of new-sown crops. Shops were closed, work was forbidden (except cooking and baking), people gave one another presents, and everyone was expected to be full of jests and japes and jollity. There were parties, at which men drew lots to see who would preside as ‘king’ of the feast; his word was law, and he could order the guests to do all kinds of ridiculous things – dance naked, for instance, or pick up the flute-girl and carry her three times round the room. Often, social distinctions were turned topsy-turvy: slaves sat at table and gorged, while their masters waited on them. We suspect that the slaves were magnanimous in office, though; tomorrow the masters would be the masters again.
    Then came the Feast of the Unconquered Sun on the 25th, a relatively sober affair. And then the wild three-day celebration of the Kalends, beginning on New Year’s Day, 1 January. All Romans, rich or poor, ate and drank the best they could afford. Adults gave one another presents yet again (children are not mentioned). Houses were decked inside and out with evergreens – holly, ivy, laurel, branches of conifers, whatever was still alive and green in the dead season. Therewere torches and lamps everywhere. People hardly went to bed, but roamed the streets disguised in masks and weird costumes of animal skins. A great deal of wine was consumed.
    So powerful were these traditions that when the Roman Empire became Christian most of its midwinter customs were adapted so as to fit in with the new religion. Christ’s birth was being celebrated on 25 December in Rome as early as the year 354, while in 567 a Church Council at Tours laid down that the whole period of twelve days from 25 December to 6 January (feast of the Epiphany) would be one long festal cycle, during which all but the most