Winter It Is Coming On

Picture masked figures appearing at your door on a dark winter's evening, their faces hidden behind soot and disguise, ready to perform ancient rituals of death and resurrection. This is mumming, a tradition stretching back centuries. From medieval Europe to its journey across the Atlantic to its dramatic transformation in modern Philadelphia, this episode brings you the story of Christmas mumming and how folk traditions are constantly remade.

Researched, written, and produced by Corinne Wieben with original music by Purple Planet.

Episode sources

Chapters

• 0:00 Pre-roll
• 0:07 Intro
• 2:30 Rare Sport
• 10:03 The Atlantic Crossing
• 14:54 From Shooters to Mummers
• 20:54 Conclusion
• 23:27 Outro

Transcript

Pre-roll
You’re listening to Enchanted, a podcast on the history of magic, sorcery, and witchcraft. I’m Corinne Wieben.

Intro
Picture a group of disguised figures appearing at your door on a winter’s evening, their faces hidden behind masks or darkened with soot, their costumes heavy with strips of paper and cloth. They have come to perform for you. This is mumming: a centuries-old tradition in which participants don disguises and either travel door-to-door or stage public entertainments.

In his 1971 edition of Eight Mummers’ Plays, Alex Helm writes, “By the end of the winter months, with food running low, primitive man must have longed for the better days ahead and the only way he knew to speed their return was by the help of magic. We now believe that the mummers’ plays as we know them today had their beginnings in such magic…” Across Europe, these performances took many forms: the English hero-combat play, featuring a knight slain and revived by a comic doctor; the German “Perchtenlauf,” in which masked figures drove out winter spirits; and the Scandinavian traditions of “julebukk,” in which revelers dressed in disguise went door-to-door. All shared common elements: disguise, seasonal timing, the temporary suspension of ordinary social rules, and the mysterious power of masks. To don a mask was to become something other than oneself, to step outside the boundaries of daily life and into a liminal space where the rules no longer applied.

Today, the most famous survival of this tradition is the Philadelphia Mummers Parade, held every New Year’s Day. But the journey from medieval Europe to modern Philadelphia is a story of controversy, cultural collision, and continuous reinvention. In this episode, I bring you the history of mummers, from their contested origins in Europe to their controversial transformation in America.

Rare Sport
Mummers’ plays, the dramatic heart of this tradition, emerged in Britain and Ireland as a form of folk theatre tied to the rhythms of the festive calendar: Christmas, Easter, and the turning of the seasons. While each region developed its own version, most Christmas plays follow a recognizable pattern. A hero appears, often St. George; a villain challenges him, perhaps a foreign knight or a fearsome dragon; combat ensues, and one falls. Then, in a moment of theatrical resurrection, a comic Doctor figure revives the slain combatant. Between the action come boastful speeches, bawdy jokes, and finally, the entrance of a devil who passes the hat and collects donations. The performers themselves were not professional actors but working-class locals: weavers, farmhands, and tradespeople who stepped outside their everyday identities to enact ritual drama for their neighbors. The elaborate costumes and concealed faces served a purpose beyond spectacle. Disguise freed the mummers from the ordinary rules of social interaction, transforming them into something other than themselves.

Some scholars have argued that the death-and-resurrection motif points to ancient fertility rites or seasonal renewal, though this interpretation remains contested. What seems clearer is that the plays functioned as living tradition: formulaic in structure yet infinitely adaptable in local detail, passed down through oral transmission and community memory. Though mumming declined in the twentieth century, many English villages have revived the practice, ensuring that these strange, masked performers continue to knock at doors and bring their dead heroes back to life. Folklorists have collected and printed multiple plays from across the British Isles, but nearly every edition notes that these plays have likely changed over time and will probably change again.

But where did mumming begin? It appears to have roots in medieval folk drama, but the textual record is unclear. One of the earliest accounts of mumming in Ireland dates from 1800, though the manuscript claims to be copying a text from 1685. It reads: “On our new green last evening here was presented the drollest piece of mummery I ever saw in or out of Ireland. There was St. George and St. Dennis and St. Patrick in their buffle coats and the Turks likewise and Oliver Cromwell, and a doctor and an old woman who made rare sport till Beelzebub came in with a frying pan upon his shoulder and a great flail in his hand threshing about him on friends and foes, and at last running away with the bold usurper whom he tweaked by his gilded nose—and then came a little Devil with a broom to gather up the money that was thrown to the Mummers for their sport. It is an ancient pastime they tell me of the citizens.”

While traditional mummers’ plays most likely date to the early modern period, mumming as the practice of Christmas “guising” has existed since at least Late Antiquity, when church officials were recorded condemning the practice of people dressing as “a little stag, a heifer, or any other kind of monster” or “into the condition of wild beasts” around the winter holidays of Saturnalia and Kalends. One ninth-century penitential complains that if anyone on January 1st “goes about as a stag or a bull; that is, making himself into a wild animal, and putting on the heads of beasts; those who in such wise transform themselves into the appearance of a wild animal: [they must do] penance for three years because it is devilish.” A fourth century writer also complains that these masked revelers “hang about every house… the gates of public officials they besiege with especial persistence, actually shouting and clapping their hands until he that is beleaguered within, exhausted, throws out to them whatever money he has and even what is not his own. And these mendicants going from door to door follow after one another, and, until late in the evening, there is no relief from this nuisance.”

In 1989, looking for the origin of mummers, folklorist Gareth Morgan proposed an elegant solution: Western mummers’ plays, he argued, descended from Greek performances called momoeri. The theory offered the appeal of classical lineage, a direct line stretching from the ancient Mediterranean to the village greens of England. But elegance alone does not make history. Folklorist Craig Fees swiftly dismantled the proposition, demonstrating that the English term “mummer” and its variants appear in the documentary record centuries before any evidence for the Greek momoeri. What Fees offered in its place was messier, but perhaps truer to how culture actually moves through time. Rather than a single ancestral line, he suggested a “common ritual substrate,” a shared foundation from which similar forms might emerge independently across time and space. Charles Phythian-Adams’s work on folklore lends weight to this kind of model. Folk traditions, he argues, rarely trace back to any single origin. They are better understood as what he calls a “fusion of the pagan and the Christian”: layered structures built from multiple, overlapping sources, accumulating over generations. 

In his 1969 study of English mummers’ plays, Alan Brody claims that the plays were not originally plays at all but derivations of ritual practices, demonstrated by the mummers’ traditional toneless chanting of the lines. He writes: “One of the major distinctions between the literary play and the ritual lies in the attitude of the performers toward the words and the audience. In the ritual an action is performed as imitation or magic. The spectators watch, but the players are not communicating directly with them… In the performance of the action, voices and bodies are used to effect whatever it is that is the object of the ritual, whether it be fertility for the land, prosperity for the tribe, health for the body, or grace for the soul... [T]he declamatory, intoning method is traditional because it is an integral part of what was originally pure ritual action in which the words (or whatever accompanying sounds there might originally have been) serve an effective, magical purpose…” Ritual, performance, or play, the complexity of mumming’s history is essential for understanding what happened when these rituals crossed an ocean and underwent yet another transformation on new soil.

The Atlantic Crossing
Whatever the deep origins of mumming may be, one thing is clear: when Europeans crossed the Atlantic, they brought their rituals with them. As Claire Sponsler has demonstrated, these “ritual imports” formed a crucial—and often overlooked—part of the cultural cargo packed into the holds of colonial ships. Far from frivolous entertainment, folk performances served strategic purposes: consoling homesick settlers, converting Indigenous peoples, and navigating the fraught encounter between worlds. They were, in their way, technologies of colonization, as essential to the imperial project as cannons and compasses.

Consider the fleet that sailed from England in 1583 under Sir Humphrey Gilbert, bound for Newfoundland to plant a colony. Alongside the expected provisions of food, tools, and weapons, Gilbert’s ships carried a surprising cargo: “Morris dancers, Hobby horsse, and Maylike conceits.” These performers were intended, the records tell us, for the “allurement of the Savages” and the “solace of our people.” Folk dancers, packed between barrels of salt pork and crates of nails, were setting sail for the edge of the known world, and they were not alone. In 1524, twelve Franciscan friars arrived in New Spain carrying a full repertoire of miracle plays and religious processions, which they immediately deployed as instruments of conversion. In the Great Lakes region, Jesuit missionaries staged processions and pageants to similar ends. One remarkable example survives from 1679: a Three Kings pageant that became something genuinely new, a hybrid performance created in collaboration with Huron refugees who adapted the European ritual to forge a communal identity in the aftermath of displacement. From Newfoundland to the Great Lakes to Mexico, ritual performance served the purposes of empire.

The mumming traditions that took root in the English-speaking colonies were not, however, a pure transplant of any single European form. They were composites, layered accumulations of multiple sources, and the colonial record preserves evidence of this complexity. German influence proved particularly strong in Pennsylvania. The tradition of belsnickling, in which a fur-clad, demonic counterpart to St. Nicholas went door to door frightening children, was so prevalent that, according to Sponsler, “belsnickling” remained the most common term for New Year’s revelers in Philadelphia until around 1830. The belsnickle (sometimes “Pelznickel,” sometimes “Krampus” in other German-speaking regions) embodied the shadow side of the Christmas season: where the benevolent St. Nicholas rewarded good children, his dark companion threatened punishment for the wicked.

Yet unmistakably English forms survived the crossing as well. In 1830, Samuel Breck published reminiscences of his Boston youth in the 1780s, recalling the holiday “Anticks” who appeared each season to perform a “foolish dialogue.” His description is unmistakable to anyone familiar with English folk drama: a hero struck down in combat, then revived by a quack doctor spouting nonsense cures. This is the death-and-resurrection play, the dramatic heart of English mumming, recognizable from Cornwall to Northumberland. That it should appear in revolutionary-era Boston testifies to the remarkable tenacity of folk traditions, their capacity to survive transplantation across an ocean and take root in foreign soil.

German belsnickling, English hero-combat plays, Scandinavian customs, and other folk practices: all of these mingled in the American colonies, creating something new from inherited fragments. This composite tradition, with its diffuse and overlapping genealogies, would eventually give rise to one of the most distinctive—and most controversial—folk institutions in American history. The imported ritual was about to be radically reshaped by its new environment.

From Shooters to Mummers
No American mumming tradition illustrates the transformation of imported ritual more dramatically than the Philadelphia Mummers Parade. Its history traces an arc from unruly working-class street theater to highly organized civic spectacle and reveals, with uncomfortable clarity, how a folk tradition can be simultaneously tamed, rebranded, and made to serve deeply troubling ideological ends.

The nineteenth-century precursors to the modern parade went by various names: “fantasticals,” “callithumpians,” and, most revealingly, “shooters.” As Sponsler documents, these were not genteel affairs. On New Year’s Eve, gangs of young working-class men donned outlandish costumes, often with blackface or masks, and took to the streets. They fired guns into the air, demanded drinks from taverns, and engaged in celebrations that veered freely between boisterous and violent. The name “shooters” was no accident: the crack of gunfire was central to the festivities, a kind of sonic assault meant to drive out the old year and blast in the new.

Traditions of misrule tend not to sit comfortably alongside commerce and civic order. By the late nineteenth century, city authorities and business interests had begun a sustained campaign to regulate the chaos. Police crackdowns increased; parade permits became mandatory. The process of institutionalization culminated in 1901, when Philadelphia sponsored its first official Mummers Parade, an event explicitly designed to channel the disruptive energy of the shooters into something more respectable. Prize money for the best costumes and performances transformed neighborhood gang rivalries into sanctioned competition. The wild men of New Year’s Eve became contestants.

But this civic reformation involved more than crowd control. It required ideological reframing. According to Sponsler, the very language shifted: vernacular terms like “shooter” gave way to the more antiquarian “mummer,” a word deliberately chosen to evoke medieval England. This semantic transformation was a calculated move linked to the Anglo-Saxon revival of the late nineteenth century, a cultural movement that sought to ground American national identity in an idealized English past.

The rebranding served two purposes. First, it granted the unruly, multi-ethnic, working-class tradition a cloak of respectability, obscuring its more complicated origins in German belsnickling and Irish immigrant neighborhoods. Second, and more consequentially, it transformed the parade into an instrument of assimilation. By recasting the festivities as an ancient English ritual, civic leaders fashioned a tool for “Americanizing” the waves of immigrants arriving from Southern and Eastern Europe. The message was clear: to participate in this venerable English custom was to become American in a very particular, nativist sense.

Yet for all the effort to sanitize the parade and anchor it in a respectable English past, one element proved stubbornly resistant to reformation: the tradition’s deep entanglement with racial parody and minstrelsy. This is not merely a nineteenth-century relic. Blackface, a common feature of the early parades, was officially banned in 1963, and some Mummers responded by defiantly wearing it in protest. The practice has proven remarkably difficult to erase. As recently as 2003, clubs performed skits celebrating minstrel performers like Al Jolson; in 2013, one group marched under the theme “Bringing Back the Minstrel Days.”The parade’s unofficial anthem tells its own story. “O! Dem Golden Slippers” was written by the Black American composer James Bland, but it was written for and performed within the minstrel tradition, embedding the racial politics of blackface performance into the soundtrack of the parade itself.

The Philadelphia Mummers Parade stands as both illustration and warning. Here we can trace how a tradition with diffuse European roots was consciously reframed to serve a nativist agenda during a period of mass immigration. Civic promoters invented an “Old English” heritage for what was, in truth, a multiethnic working-class festival, fashioning it into an instrument of assimilation. But even as the parade was being institutionalized and sanitized, it kept the unruly energies of its past. What emerged was a uniquely American spectacle, layered with civic pride and communal solidarity, but shadowed by a persistent legacy of racial mockery that decades of reform have failed to fully erase. The parade’s history offers a lesson: traditions are never simply inherited. They are always being remade, and the choices about how to remake them are inescapably political. In these rituals, history is not a settled text to be read. It is a dynamic performance to be lived.

Conclusion
The journey of European folk rituals across the Atlantic was never a simple story of preservation. As the clash between Gareth Morgan and Craig Fees reminds us, even in Europe these traditions resist tidy narratives of direct descent. Their passage to North America involved something far more dynamic: adaptation, reinvention, and negotiation. What crossed the ocean were not museum pieces, carefully wrapped and shipped intact, but living practices, and living practices change. They are reshaped by new landscapes, new neighbors, and new conflicts. They absorb what they find.

This holiday season, when mummers once again take to the streets of Philadelphia in their elaborate costumes, they will carry with them the weight of centuries: the medieval revels of Europe, the cultural cargo of colonization, and the fraught racial politics of American history. Whether we see them as preservers of ancient tradition or perpetuators of troubling legacies may depend on which layer of their complex history we choose to examine. But this much is certain: those masked figures, parading through the winter streets, are participants in a ritual far older and more complicated than most likely realize.

Whether they take the form of ritual, drama, or wild revels, mummers’ plays are a living link to a deep past, one that is rewritten, for better or worse, by each new generation of performers, and with each winter, comes a new a chance to try again.

In the final refrains of a Christmas mummer’s play from Cheshire, the performers sing:

The winter it is coming on, dark, dirty, wet and cold;
And to try your good nature this night we do make bold;
This night we do make bold with your ‘alfpence and strong beer,
And we’ll come no more a’acting until another year.

Outro
If you enjoyed this episode, you can subscribe to Enchanted wherever you listen. This episode was produced by me with original music by Purple Planet. You can find them at purple dash planet dot com. If you want to learn more the history of mummers, be sure to check out the sources link in the show notes, especially Claire Sponsler’s Ritual Imports: Performing Medieval Drama in America. Special thanks to Enchanted’s Patreon patrons for supporting the production of this and every episode. If you want to support Enchanted, please visit patreon dot com slash enchantedpodcast. If you’re looking for a way to support the show that won’t cost you anything, you can always give Enchanted: The History of Magic & Witchcraft a five-star rating on Apple Podcasts, Podchaser, Audible, or wherever you listen and recommend it to your friends. You can get in touch with me via email at enchantedpodcast at gmail dot com or follow on Bluesky at enchantedpodcast. As always, for more information and special features, visit enchantedpodcast dot net. I’m Corinne Wieben. Thank you for listening and stay enchanted.