Blog - Day: December 17, 2024

The Christmas Wren

Electra Rhodes

It’s Christmas Day when I find the wren’s body in the frost-rimed gutter at the edge of the lane. Later, I’ll regret that my first thought was that in custom and folklore the wren had died a day too soon.

The practice is a bit of typical human bait and switch – on the 26th December, St Stephen’s Day, boys would hunt and kill a wren; the tiny bird’s death standing in for ours in a ritualised sacrifice that lamented all the wrongs we were doing to nature. There are songs and stories and a chunky body of conflicting research that round out the lore.