Christmas… is a really weird holiday, to me.
The religious, spiritual, aesthetic parts of it—those I understand.
It’s a dark season for you humans; the lights and the sweets and the singing all certainly
help to brighten things up a bit.
What I’ve never really been able to wrap my head around… is the big red home-invader
who colludes with parents to make their children behave better.
That… always sort of seemed like a mis-matched piece to me.
When you think about it, it’s really a separate piece of fiction unto itself—even most of
the kids past a certain age grant that.
So why is it so important?
Why is this the story so many people tell this time of year?
Well, I think I’ve actually come to an understanding.
It only started to make sense to me when I found an older version of Santa Claus.
Something from the world of Slavic fairytales.
Something… a little darker than what you may be used to.
And, if you love Santa as a tradition, do be careful with this video.
I think this has a real chance to sour the whole experience for you.
Let me share with you the tale… of Morozko, the Frost Demon.
Before we do anything else, I want to thank all of you who make these videos worthwhile.
Everyone who likes these videos and subscribes to the channel—and especially everyone who
supports us on patreon—it’s hard to say how much all of that means to us.
To all of you creative humans who watch this show, we love you.
The way this story begins should sound pretty familiar to you.
It’s not your typical holiday tale, but it is a pretty standard fairytale setup.
It’s about a girl, trapped under her cruel step-mother’s roof.
While her step-sister is lavished with praise and adoration, gifts and kindnesses, the poor
girl is of course neglected, berated, abused, forced to do the lion’s share of the housework.
Her step-mother despises her so much, just the sound of the girl’s voice in the next
room is enough to send her into a rage.
You’d think her birth father would step in to defend her, but the man is utterly spineless.
Worse than spineless, in fact, because when the step-mother has finally had enough and
demands he at last get rid of the girl—take her out into the woods in the dead of winter
and leave her there alone—the man hardly even protests.
He’s willing to kill his own daughter, just to pacify this wretched woman.
Parent of the year.
Of course, we know this story works.
The girl deserves so much better.
She is a shining example of temperance and patience, never even raising her voice against
her parents, regardless of how much abuse and neglect she receives.
Almost verbatim from the version of the story I read, the text says: “she was as good
as gold.
In good hands, she would have swum in cheese and butter, but, living with her stepmother,
she bathed herself every day in tears.”
Uh… looking past the visual of swimming in cheese and butter… *shiver*… suffice
it to say, she’s been through the ringer and is due a good turn.
In that forest clearing, as her father rides off into the night and the deathly cold begins
to creep in through her clothes… she finds it.
With nothing left to do, the girl settles onto the forest floor and clasps her hands
in quiet prayer.
As if in answer, the boughs of the trees begin to shake.
The air fills with the crackle of fresh frost.
A small figure appears, leaping from branch to branch, descending through the canopy toward
her.
As it approaches, she realizes that the sound she’s hearing isn’t that of frost at all,
but the snapping and popping of his small, ancient joints.
He sweeps down onto the forest floor beside her, and needs no introduction.
She knows who it is immediately.
This is Morozko, the Demon of Frost.
It’s worth noting that there are a lot of different interpretations of this character
and that he really changes a lot over time.
But… it’s also a bit much to get into in one video, so at the end we’ll tell you
where you can see the un-filtered version where we really get into who Morozko is and
why we’ve portrayed him the way that we have here.
One thing is absolutely certain across all the different versions of this story, though:
he is an incarnation of winter.
More a force than an actual figure.
As he draws near, the frost demon stares into the girl’s eyes with a wild intensity and
asks, “Maiden, are you warm?”
With special care to show her respect and reverence for him, she answers that she is
indeed.
He draws nearer still, freezing the air around her, filling it up with the sound of his crackling,
frosty joints, and asks yet again: “Beauty, are you warm?”
Again, with even greater respect in her voice, she tells him that she is.
He draws so close that the cold wrenches her lungs until she can hardly breathe.
The crackling has grown so loud that the air seems to be full of knives and darts.
He stares into her with his blazing, icy eyes, and asks one more time: “sweet clover, are
you warm?”
And despite his piercing gaze and the stabbing cold, she looks it him unshaken, and tells
him one final time that yes, she is warm.
Delighted, Morozko showers the girl with gifts: furs and coverings to keep her warm, a chest
full of elaborate bridal garments, a robe of silver and gold.
Swaddled in her new finery, she sits in the domain of the frost demon and begins to sing
sweetly to herself, apparently no more disturbed or rattled than when she’d first been abandoned.
The spirit is pleased.
Meanwhile, back at home, the stepmother is eager to reap the fruits of her plan.
She’s been cooking and preparing all day for the girl’s funeral, and, figuring that
enough time has passed for the deed to be done with, she at last sends the girl’s
father away to fetch her frozen body.
While he’s gone, in classic fairytale fashion, their pet dog begins to speak to her from
beneath the table.
Because... of course it does.
He reveals a prophecy to her that she would have rather never heard: that the girl is
not dead at all, but in fact bedecked with finery that will surely destine her for a
marriage the likes of which her own daughter could only ever dream of.
Unwilling to listen, she beats the dog to silence it, and then tries to coax a different,
more favorable prophecy out of it by bribing it some of the food she’d been preparing.
But no matter how she tries, the dog will only speak the truth.
In the middle of this exchange, the doors and windows of the house blow open, heralding
the arrival of the girl and her father.
Almost the instant the stepmother sees what’s become of the girl, she demands her husband
take her own daughter into the woods as well, so that she might claim the same fabulous
rewards.
So, ever spineless, that’s exactly he does.
But unlike the man’s daughter, the step-daughter is not quite as good as gold.
She’s been doted on her entire life, spoiled nearly to the point of fermentation.
When Morozko finds her in the woods, she does not stand her ground against him.
He asks whether she’s cold three times, and each time she only becomes more indignant,
demanding even more firmly that he give her what she came for.
Furious at the presumption, Morozko, demon of frost, the winter cold itself incarnate,
freezes the girl to death where she stands.
Again, the stepmother sends away her husband, this time to retrieve her daughter from the
woods.
And again, the dog has a prophecy for her: that while the man’s daughter will soon
become a fine wife for a fine husband, her own daughter will become nothing but a bag
of bones.
Horrified, the stepmother defaults to her one constant course: beatings and bribery.
But the dog will not lie, no matter the abuse, no matter the gift.
And from here, we already know where the story ends.
The father returns with the step-daughter, but when her mother attempts to embrace her,
she finds herself embracing a lifeless, frozen corpse.
In one version of the story, she herself freezes to death as she holds her daughter.
Okay, so, notably, that is not the standard Christmas vibe.
A mother freezing to death as she embraces her dead daughter is really a far cry from
sleigh-bells and cookies on the hearth.
And yet… this story has opened my eyes to something fascinating about the fiction surrounding
the holiday.
Something I think goes beyond the realm of culture and rituals and reaches into what
it means to be human.
And as writers and storytellers, I think we can learn a lot from it.
The Santa Clause story that so many people participate in every year is not just a fun
activity.
Yes, Santa is something of a commercial mascot who enables the sales of a great many products
every year.
Yes, he is kind of caricature, and no one means to take him very seriously.
These things are true.
But just like the domestic spirits of so many traditions throughout the world, Santa is
a spirit of home-life.
He himself is a celebration of this care-free time in a child’s life where the parents
have the opportunity to dote on their children and, very literally, “treasure” them.
But he’s also a manifestation of the parent’s stake in the exchange.
He’s “making his list and checking it twice”, apparently ready to punish the children
who are naughty, and reward those who are nice.
Ostensibly—according to the custom, I don’t know how many parents actually adhere to the
naughty and nice thing—the gifts are a reward for the child’s ability to obey.
And in that idea there’s a sort of… domestic transaction taking place.
Give your parents the correct sort of behavior; reap the benefits.
This all seems sort of obvious when I say it aloud, but I wasn’t actually able to
appreciate it properly until I saw its opposite in Morozko.
This is a story where the home does not reward obedience.
A child can be “as good as gold”, and still literally get murdered by her parents.
I don’t think it gets much clearer than that.
For the girl in the story, the reward comes from outside the home, and it has nothing
to do with her obedience.
Unlike Santa Clause, who comes into your home and colludes with your parents to celebrate
your childhood and coax you into following their wishes, Morozko waits in the wilderness,
far away from the domestic life.
He demands not that you do as he says, but that you endure without a provider.
Be independent.
Face the circumstances in front of you and demand nothing that you yourself cannot provide.
“Are you warm, maiden?”, he asks.
And by this he means, “can you master yourself in the face of the cold?
Or do you give in to it, surrender when someone else cannot provide for you?”
Because unlike Santa Clause, Morozko is not a surrogate for your parents.
He is the winter itself.
A force of nature.
Crossing beyond the threshold of the home and into the wilderness, your rewards no longer
come from how well you can ingratiate yourself to your caregivers, but how well you can care
for yourself.
Whether you can face the cold, and find your warmth within.
And this, for the vast majority of people, is simply a fact of life.
I, of course, have never experienced it myself, but I’ve seen so many people looking longingly
back on their Christmas memories, comparing their difficult adulthood to their “magical”
childhood years.
And really, when you boil it down, so much of the “magic” they’re missing… is
just a setting where things are simpler for them; a place where success is as easy as
obedience.
It must be a very hard change to accept, and although I’m not really equipped to address
it, I do wonder how this affects one’s emergence into adulthood.
I’m going to be thinking about this a lot more when I imagine my characters and their
stories.
How gracefully have they made the transition?
How have they reconciled the differences between the world of their childhood and the world
of adult life?
What will they say when they find themselves alone in the wilderness and they hear the
voice asking: “Are you warm?”
And… that would be where the video ends… except...
I have more to say.
There’s a whole section of this video about the origins of Santa Clause and Morozko, where
their modern incarnations come from and what these two very different figures have in common.
It’s… also a little beside the point, so we ultimately decided to trim it out for
time.
But…
I couldn’t quite let it all go.
I had to keep a full version of the video out there somewhere.
It seemed right.
Thankfully, there is a place where we can share that stuff.
Where we don’t have to worry about streamlining our content so that it’s a perfect fit for
attention spans and algorithms.
You can watch it over on our creator-owned streaming platform, Nebula.
Youtube is a weird place for educational content.
It’s not exactly made for honesty and accuracy, there’s a huge demand to just be click-baity
and eyecatching all the time.
Sometimes… you just want to share some cool information without sweating about performance.
So, a bunch of us educational creators got together and made our own platform where we
don’t have to worry about all of that.
We upload what we want, how we want.
You can find all our videos there ad-free, and full of additional content we normally
have to cut out for Youtube, including the extended version of this video.
And we’re not the only ones.
The same is true for so… many… other… amazing creators.
It’s a safe haven for the material we wish we could share here.
And the best part is that you don’t even quite have to pay for Nebula if you don’t
want to.
The good people at the Curiosity Stream want to make sure we indie creators will always
have this special space, so they’ve decided to foot the bill for Nebula for anyone who
signs up with them.
Get a year of Curiosity Stream, and you get a year of Nebula for free.
If you like highly-produced documentaries—and I mean really highly produced, this beats
just about anything you’ll find on netflix—I cannot recommend Curiosity Stream enough.
It’s got thousands of titles, including videos about everything from prehistoric aquatic
monsters to the cutting edge of modern science.
But if you really enjoyed learning a new piece of folklore in this video and challenging
what you thought you knew about old legends and traditions, there is one documentary you
have to see.
I have watched this over and over.
It’s called Monsters and Myths, and it chronicles the journey of experts trying to unravel the
mysterious truths behind or favorite folklore creatures; monsters like dragons and the Chupacabra,
and the strange histories behind them.
Tale Foundry videos are a starting place for your imagination, but watch this documentary
and you will have so much more to work with, I promise.
Oh, and Curiosity Stream has also done their best to make it all accessible, too.
Usually Tale Foundry fans who sign up get a generous 26% off their subscriptions, but
if you sign up through our link before December 24th, you’ll save a whole 42% on your subscription.
That brings the price down from $14.79 per year—which is already a ridiculous price
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Click the link in the description (or go to CuriosityStream.com/talefoundry) and use the
code “talefoundry” to get access to both streaming services for just $11.59 a year.
That’s less than a dollar per month!
If you do go watch the longer version, be sure to come back here and let us know what
you think!
We’ll be reading the comments to see how the new ideas in that version of the video
inspired you!
And… that’s it for this video!
There’s usually a few weeks between uploads, so if you want more Tale foundry in the mean-time,
come join our community!
We have a discord server that’s basically like a big family of creatives—a lot of
love, there.
We also run writing groups on Twitch every week, if you want to get some practice in!
You can find links to all of it in the description.
Hope to see you there!
Until then, thanks for watching, and keep making stuff up!
I’ll see you…
next time.
Bye!