Yeah. Ke Dezemba in ZA and we all know what that means. But the revelry it brings isn’t new and it certainly isn’t exclusive to South Africa.
Kegeesh Ommidjagh – the foolish fortnight – begins (began?) on Oie’l Thomase Doo (Black Thomas’ Eve) (that was 21st December) on the Isle of Man, and well… they got up to some naughtiness, back in the day:
Rampant fun & the relaxing of moral codes(!) were the norm across the Isle of Man throughout Christmas in the past. Barns were claimed for dancing across the Kegeesh Ommidjagh, with fiddlers hired by public money, where parties apparently got so wild that youths sometimes felt compelled to go outside to continue their ‘close celebrations of the festival’ in the hedgerows…
There’s even a passage from George Waldron’s ‘A Description of the Isle of Man’ , written in 1731 that recounts the scenes – surprisingly candidly for those days:
“There is not a barn unoccupied the whole twelve days, every parish hiring fiddlers at the public charge; and all the youth, nay, sometimes people well advanced in years making no scruple to be among these nocturnal dancers.
At this time there never fails of some work being made for Kirk Jarmyns; so many young fellows and girls meeting in these diversions, nature too often prompts them to more close celebrations of the festival, than those the barn allows; and many a hedge has been witness of endearments, which fear of punishment has afterwards made both forswear at the holy altar in purgation.”
The whole thing is quite a read.
But if nocturnal copulation in the local farmers’ fields in the middle of winter wasn’t foolish enough, then you really need to click here and read some of the astonishingly bizarre traditions of the Kegeesh Ommidjagh.
Groups of young lads roamed the towns making ‘a rare din’ singing, dancing and playing homemade instruments, carrying mollags – inflated sheep’s bladders – with which they hit anyone who got too close. The aim was to make money, but they were perhaps hounding it out of people more than receiving willing donations!
Ah yes – the old sheep’s bladder boinkers. Always a giggle.
In church was the Oie’ll Verree service which took place on Christmas Eve. Here the singing of carols was accompanied by young women throwing peas at young men.
Standard religious nonsense.
Amidst the final drinking and dancing there was the Cutting off the Fiddler’s Head, where the fiddler lay his head on a woman’s lap and made prophesies of who would pair with whom over the coming year.
But these festivities were interrupted by the Laair Vane – a person hidden under a sheet controlling a horse’s head. This ‘White Mare’ would go around attacking people snapping its jaws until it was chased from the room.
Ah. Simpler times.
Look. There was no Netflix, no internet, no football around back then. I guess that you just had to make your own entertainment, and it does appear that the Manx people, having saved up all their joviality (and all their sheep’s bladders and their peas) for 50 weeks, really went to town on making their own stuff up for the Christmas period.
But honestly, who was the first to come up with any of this stuff, and why wasn’t he or she immediately stopped at the first mention of decapitation of musicians or people hiding under bedsheets pretending to be bits of an equine?
They were clearly all rather mad over there.
Not much has changed.
