Olentzero

A charcoal pit has to be watched the way a fire has to be watched, which is to say without stopping. The collier stacks his cordwood into a dome the height of a man, seals it under turf and damp earth, lights it through a shaft in the centre and then spends the next week not going home. He sleeps in a lean-to of branches. He wakes in the dark to the smell of resin turning to tar, walks the mound in the frost feeling for the hot patch where the crust has split, and shovels soil onto it before the whole stack catches and burns itself to nothing. When he finally comes down off the mountain he is black to the elbows, half deaf from silence, and extremely thirsty. The Basques took that man and put him at the centre of Christmas.

He was not, in the older tellings, a nice man. The carols call him red-eyed, which in Basque is not a description of grief. One of the most widely sung asks red-eyed Onentzaro where he caught that fish, the fish being his drunkenness, and answers itself: last night at eleven, on the rocks at Zurriola. Another has him getting through a ten-arroba skin of wine lees in a single evening, better than a hundred litres, and then calls him a big-bellied pig, warmly. Children in Berastegi who would not go to bed heard a sickle come clattering down the chimney and were told the owner was on his way up to cut their throats.

Pío Baroja remembered a maid in his household warning him that boys who would not wash, and who got lice for it, were taken down to Zurriola beach, where their hair was twisted into a rope and Onentzaro dragged them by it across the sand into the sea. In Araba on the last day of December, youngsters were teased about a man walking the streets with more eyes than the year has days. That is the folk arithmetic, and it turns out to be oddly precise.

The poet Nikolas Ormaetxea, writing as Orixe, gave the full inventory: red eyes, as many eyes as there are days in the year and one more, a belly the size of a cart, a face that is all mouth. Orixe then admitted he had no idea where the creature had come from. Larraun cut him down to three eyes and dressed him as a scarecrow, a drunk propped up in a field. The Olentzero who now rides through the streets on a decorated chair is a different proposition altogether: a stout farmer in a black beret and rope-soled abarketak, pipe clamped in his teeth, a hen under one arm, a bottle of wine and a basket of eggs, cheeks smudged with the charcoal that is supposed to explain him. Whether he has a beard is still, apparently, open.

The name came first, and it was not a name. The earliest record is Lope de Isasti, writing in the first half of the seventeenth century and glossing a Basque usage for Castilian readers: Christmas Eve, he says, we call onenzaro, the season of the good ones. That is what the word appears to be. On for good, a genitive plural, and the suffix that Basque uses to mark a stretch of time, the same one that turns haur, child, into haurtzaro, childhood. Onentzaro was a span of the calendar before it was anybody. In parts of Navarre the same span is called subilaro instead, after the log burned on the hearth. Later attempts to squeeze Noël out of the word, or the vocative O Nazarene from the liturgy, or an alms-season, have not convinced the philologists.

Where the person came from is the better question, and the usual answer is that he is the last of the giants. Basque tradition remembers the jentilak, an older race who lived in the high country, threw stones from summit to summit, raised the dolmens and, being mountain people, burned charcoal. José Miguel de Barandiarán collected the story from a shepherd of Aralar. The jentilak were amusing themselves in a meadow up there when a light came over the eastern horizon, too bright to look at. Only their oldest man, whose eyes were nearly gone, could face it. He looked, and said that Kixmi had been born and their time was over. Kixmi was their word for Christ, and it meant monkey. They carried the old man to a cliff at his own asking and threw him off, and after that the rest of them went into the earth, or fell, or simply left, depending on who is telling it. One stayed behind. He walked down to the village to tell people what had happened.

A gentler version, the one children get, has no giants in it at all. A newborn is abandoned in the woods and found by a lamia, who names him Olentzero, gives him strength and a mild temper, and hands him to an elderly couple living alone with no children of their own. He grows into a charcoal burner who is good with his hands, carves wooden toys and carries them down in the sack he uses for charcoal. He dies pulling children out of a burning house. The lamia gives him his life back on the understanding that he keeps doing it.

For a long time the way to meet him was to build him. In Uharte-Arakil he hung from a window on a rope, wrapped in a straw mantle. In Lekunberri he was lashed to the chimney. In Dima a straw dummy with a sickle went up on the church tower after midnight mass, and anyone who had broken the fast of the week before Christmas was reminded in rhyme that red-eyed Onentzaro had reached the chimney and would be taking necks. In Areso a grown man put on the costume and went out with the sickle after whichever children were still on the street. Everywhere the figure was carried door to door on a chair while his bearers sang and collected food, wine and coins, the same alms-round the Basques run at Santa Ageda in February. At Lesaka they finish by burning him.

The Olentzero most people now know was rebuilt on purpose. Around 1952, under Franco, a group in Zarautz called Irrintzi Elkartea set about reviving the custom, and in the process filed off the sickle and most of the paganism, since the audience was going to be small children. From 1956 the reworked figure spread out of its corner of Gipuzkoa. In the 1970s he took on a job he had never previously held, that of bringing presents, offered as a Basque answer to the Three Kings and to Père Noël, and the slogan was blunt about the politics of it: the Kings are Spanish. Since 1994 he has come accompanied by Mari Domingi, a woman in medieval dress lifted out of an old Christmas carol, so the gift-bringing is no longer entirely a man’s business. None of that makes him a modern invention. It makes him a four-hundred-year-old word that grew a body in the seventeenth century and a job description in the twentieth.

What he can do follows from what he is. He knows before anyone else does, being the one who came down with the news, and the eyes account for the rest, since a figure with three hundred and sixty-six of them is not going to miss much of what goes on in a house over a year. He rewards and he punishes, and in the older material the punishing was the main event. He eats and drinks on a scale that is itself the argument, arriving as he does at the hinge of the dark half of the year, when a full belly is a claim that the food will last. He blesses the houses he is carried past. He manages to be in every town on the same night, which nobody has ever felt the need to explain.

His limits are the limits of a calendar. He gets one night, and in a few places a different one, the twenty-seventh at Ochagavía, the thirty-first at Ermua, and outside it he does not exist at all. He cannot stay: the effigy comes down off the tower, and at Lesaka it goes on the fire, and the burning is the point, because the old year has to be destroyed before the new one will start. He is the survivor of a people who did not survive, which in the giant stories leaves him permanently on the wrong side of an ending he announced himself. And he is vulnerable to editing. The sickle went. The threats went. The wine, so far, has stayed.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Olentzero?

Olentzero is a figure from Basque Christmas tradition, a charcoal burner who comes down from the mountains on the night of 24 December. In the most widely told legend he is the last of the jentilak, the Basque giants, and the one who carried the news of Christ’s birth to the villages. Today he brings presents to children across the Basque Country.

Why is Olentzero a charcoal burner?

Charcoal burning was the work of the Basque mountains, and the jentilak of legend are remembered as mountain people who did it. The trade also explains the figure’s appearance: the soot-stained face, the sack he carries, and the week-long absences from the village that let him arrive from somewhere else. In modern depictions his cheeks are still smudged black.

Is Olentzero the Basque Santa Claus?

Only recently, and only in part. Olentzero is documented from the seventeenth century as the name of the Christmas season and as a frightening midwinter figure, not a gift-bringer. He acquired the role of delivering presents in the 1970s, when it was promoted as a Basque alternative to the Three Kings and Père Noël.

What does the name Olentzero mean?

The earliest recorded form is Onentzaro, which appears to combine on, meaning “good”, with a genitive plural and the suffix -zaro, marking a season, giving roughly “the season of the good ones”. Lope de Isasti recorded it in the seventeenth century as the Basque term for Christmas Eve. Other proposed derivations, including one from Noël, are not generally accepted.

Why is Olentzero burned?

In several towns, Lesaka among them, the straw effigy carried through the streets is set alight at the end of the night. The burning marks the destruction of the old year so the new one can begin, and it belongs to the same family of customs as hanging the figure from a chimney or a church tower. The gift-bringing Olentzero and the burned Olentzero coexist in the same tradition.

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