One of the consequences of researching and writing folklore and history books is that bits of arcane trivia lodge in your head and punctuate the year like alarm bells. For example, the sequence of calendar customs from Christmas through to Twelfth Night accompanies my festive season like partridges and pears.
I’m particularly unfond of the fourth day of Christmas, December the 28th. Along with the surely unwelcome gift of four calling birds and residual poultry, on the fourth day of Christmas my true love gave to me… Childermas.
It sounds innocuous, but Childermas, aka Holy Innocents Day, marks the occasion a couple of thousand years ago when, according to legend, King Herod slaughtered all children in Bethlehem under the age of two. His aim was to ensure that Jesus – who legend had cast as the true king, a descendent of King David – did not usurp him.
The murdered children are the earliest martyrs in the Christian tradition, ascending to the ranks of saintdom in spite of being unbaptised. Inscrutable church scribes have estimated the number of these micro- martyrs as between six and twenty-five. The argument that elevated them to heaven was that they hadn’t just died for Jesus, like most of the other saints, but had also died instead of him. And, in fairness to the poor children, baptism hadn’t been invented yet.
Childermas is one of the unluckiest days of the year in British folklore and has been observed as a church feast in the West since the 4th century. It doesn’t matter what did and didn’t happen historically, this is a day when pretty much everything should be avoided.
The day also comes with some gloomy weatherlore. A grey, drizzly Childermas means scarcity in the year ahead, while a fine day means the proverbial cup overfloweth. On a murky, rainy December 28th in 2019, the folkloric devil on my shoulder tut-tutted as usual, and I tried to ignore it. Alas, 2020 brought Covid-19 and general calamity. On December 28th that year, I caught the virus.
In many ways, this misfortune was inevitable, as there was a wild card at play, too: the last Monday in December is known in folklore as Judas’ Birthday, and it’s incredibly unlucky. So, if Childermas falls on the last Monday of the month, it’s best to stay in bed all day with your favourite podcast. In 2020, December 28th was a Monday, so there can be no possible reason for me catching Covid other than the lethal combo of Childermas and Judas.
I don’t really believe in all this stuff, of course, but as few people these days have even heard of Childermas, I’d like to reinstate it as a cautionary note to the folklore calendar.
Steve Roud notes in Pocket Guide to Superstitions of the British Isles (2004), “the day was a ‘dismal’ (dies male means ‘bad day’ in Latin) day, with muffled peals of bells and, despite falling with the twelve days of Christmas, with a subdued and penitential air”. It’s the hangover after the celebrations of the first three days of Christmas.
Tradition maintains that if you do any washing on this dismal day, you will wash away one of your loved ones. You must also avoid wearing new clothes and cutting your nails; and if you’re thinking of setting sail, think again. Any sailor leaving port on the 28th will end up feeding the fish.
And it’s not just fishermen who must beware: Brand’s Popular Antiquities of Great Britain (1849) notes that “the day on which this festival falls was reckoned unlucky for the commencement of any work or task”. Not a good time, then, for attempting a souffle or taking your first violin lesson. Brand also states that, “This day is of most unlucky omen. None ever marries on a Childermas Day”.
Chambers Book of Days (1864) is similarly gloomy: “Innocents’ Day used to be reckoned about the most unlucky throughout the year, and in former times, no one who could possibly avoid it, began any work, or entered on any undertaking, on this anniversary … This idea of the inauspicious nature of the day was long prevalent, and is even yet not wholly extinct. To the present hour we understand the housewives in Cornwall, and probably also in other parts of the country, refrain scrupulously from scouring or scrubbing on Innocents’ Day.”
Luckily, you’re still allowed to sing on Childermas. The underlying tradition of Herod slaying children is found in several carols and hymns, including The Coventry Carol (Roud 19028) and Herod That Was Both Wild and Wode.
The miserable message of Childermas would have resonated in the many centuries before modern medicine and childcare. Infant mortality was commonplace, and the 28th of December had a morbid relevance for the thousands of parents who didn’t want to face yet another child bereavement.
Mourning can take on strange, guises, though. The Rev. John Gregorie, in 1684, made the rather alarming observation, “It hath been a custom, and yet is elsewhere, to whip up the children upon Innocents’ Day morning, that the memory of this murder might stick the closer; and, in a moderate proportion, to act over the cruelty again in kind”. The logic was that the message of Holy Innocents Day would be beaten into the poor kids. In a milder version, children were woken on Childermas morning by having their bottoms slapped while they were still in bed. While commemorating violence with violence has a certain dark logic, this is definitely not a tradition to revive.
But folklore is nothing if not perverse, and a parallel tradition says that children should be protected from all harm today and can do pretty much what they want without being punished. This ties into another ancient custom – the installation of boy bishops, who held their unorthodox posts from St Nicholas’s Day (December 6th) until Holy Innocents. The mini- bishops were usually choirboys, and they wore episcopal robes, delivered sermons, led processions, and were allowed to collect offerings for the church or even for pocket money. Some institutions, including York Minster, had special vestments and jewels for their child bishops. It’s a gentle variation on the inversion-of-the-natural order theme found in winter traditions such as the Lord of Misrule or the Krampus processions. The 16th-century Reformation killed off the tradition in England; although Boy Bishops underwent a modest revival in Catholic churches in Britain in the late 20th century.
In December 2009, a teenage girl was appointed Britain’s first female Boy Bishop at All Saints’ Church, Wellingborough. This groundbreaking event necessitated a tweak to the old, gendered title, and the young ecclesiastics are now frequently referred to as Chorister Bishops.
The bad luck of Childermas lingers through the year. Francis Kildale Robinson’s Glossary of Yorkshire Words and Phrases (1855) notes: “One of our unlucky days; so much so, that the day of the week on which it falls is marked as a black day for the whole year to come.” This means that every Saturday in 2025 is going to be tainted with Childermas unluckiness. Many football teams will be able to put their five-nil weekend drubbing behind them with a nonchalant shrug of the shoulders and a curt, “Childermas, innit?”.
As a non-superstitious person (in spite of the Covid episode), I will try my best not to take a jaundiced view of Saturdays in 2025. I will doubtless spend lots of them in supermarket queues that seem to be moving much slower than the others, and many would-be Saturday lie-ins will be thwarted by the dogs woofing to go out for a wee, but I’ll resist the urge to blame King Herod and his murderous crew.
