CHRISTMAS CUSTOMS
While (we hope) all of you would be delighted to see a Wren in your garden at any time of year, a number of rather macabre traditions used to see them trapped and often killed on December 26 (St Stephen’s Day, or Wren Day in the past, but now Boxing Day, of course).
‘Wrenning’, or ‘Hunting The Wren’, is now pretty much restricted to western Ireland and the Isle of Man, but once also took place in most of southern Ireland and south-west Scotland, and parts of the south-east and east of England.
People would go out in fancy dress, catch or kill a Wren, then nail it to a pole or put it in a cage wreathed with Holly and other winter greenery. It would then be paraded from house to house, where the ‘wren boys’ accompanying it would sing to the occupants and request gifts of food and drink, sometimes giving out lucky feathers from the bird in return.
In modern times, fortunately, a symbolic cage is used instead, rather than an actual bird, and charity donations are collected.
The rituals may derive from
Celtic mythology, symbolising a midwinter sacrifice, as the Celts considered the Wren a symbol of the past year, and killing one was thus seen as a way of ensuring new life in the year to come.
It may also be connected to the Wren’s habit of singing even in midwinter (Robins and Mistle Thrushes are the only other
British songbirds that regularly do this). In fact, in the Netherlands, its name is ‘winterkoninkje’, or ‘winter king’, reflecting this.
But in Ireland the explanation most commonly put forward is a Christian one. The story is that God set a challenge to find out the king of all birds, with the bird that flew highest and furthest winning. All dropped out one by one except the eagle, but even it grew tired and started to fly lower, at which point the Wren that had stowed away beneath its wings emerged to fly a little above it. Certainly a number of legends associate the Wren with treachery, with it being accused of betraying the martyr St Stephen to his persecutors.
But on a lighter note, Wrens also long enjoyed the same sort of affection from humans as Robins, with taboos against harming them the rest of the year, perhaps again because of their previous status as pagan totem animals, and as the King of the Birds.