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Mummering Explained

J. Jin  included in  category To-See
     2753 words   13 minutes 

Mummering Explained: Newfoundland’s Banned Christmas Tradition That Came Back to Life

Walk through the arrivals hall at St. John’s International Airport sometime in late December and you may see a small group of figures standing near the Christmas trees. They are wearing pyjamas, with bras pulled on over winter coats and pillowcases on their heads. They are carrying decorated sticks that rattle when they move.

If you are a Come From Away, you assume something has gone wrong.

Nothing has gone wrong. These are mummers. They are the most distinctive Christmas tradition in Newfoundland, and for more than a hundred years they were illegal.

The story behind the costumes is older and stranger than most of the brochures will tell you.

Mummering — also called mumming or janneying in different parts of the province — is a house-visiting custom practiced during the twelve days of Christmas. The structure is simple. A group of friends or neighbours disguise themselves so completely that even people who know them well cannot guess who they are. They go from house to house, perform a little (a song, a dance, a joke, sometimes pure nonsense), and the hosts try to identify them. Once the disguise is lifted, food and drink follow.

The tradition arrived with English and Irish settlers, and the earliest known written record on the island dates to 1819. Versions of it had been practiced in the British Isles for centuries before that, with roots stretching back to medieval house-visiting customs.

What makes the Newfoundland version distinct is how thoroughly it was absorbed into outport life. By the mid-nineteenth century, mummering was a fixed feature of the Christmas season in dozens of small fishing communities along the coast — and a more chaotic, public-facing version had taken hold in St. John’s.

There is also a practical layer that gets overlooked. Newfoundland winters are long, dark, and cold. Mummering is, among other things, a way of getting through them. A custom that pulls people out of their houses and into each other’s kitchens in the middle of January does real work in a place where January lasts a long time.

This piece is, in effect, a written companion to a short documentary I made on the same topic in 2018.

📺 Banned Tradition, Recreated Tradition: Introduction to Mummering in Newfoundland
Korean narration with English subtitles, with footage and interviews from the St. John’s Mummers Festival.

Mummering does not work without commitment. The point is not to look festive. The point is to become unrecognizable.

Costumes are improvised from whatever is at hand. Old clothes worn inside out. Lampshades as hats. Rubber boots on the wrong feet. Pillows stuffed into shirts and trousers to alter the body’s silhouette. Bras worn outside the coat. Cross-dressing has been part of the tradition for as long as it has been documented — men in dresses, women in their husbands’ coats. The face is covered with a hood, scarf, mask, or pillowcase.

There is a running joke among regulars at the Mummers Festival that every proper costume needs a bra somewhere on it. It is not really a joke. The bra-on-the-outside is one of the most reliable visual signals that the people coming up your walk are mummers and not, say, very strange Jehovah’s Witnesses.

Then there is the voice. The most famous mummering technique is ingressive speech — speaking while inhaling rather than exhaling. The result is a strangled, breathy sound that does a remarkable job of erasing vocal identity. Anyone who has tried it can confirm two things: it is harder than it looks, and it is genuinely unsettling to hear in your own kitchen.

The hosts respond with their own rituals. They are allowed to poke and prod the mummers, ask them questions, force them to laugh. In some communities, hosts have been known to play tricks back — offering the visitors cookies dosed with salt, syrup made from beet juice, or matches slipped into cigarettes. The whole encounter is built on inversion: the familiar made strange, the home made into a small theatre, the rules of polite visiting suspended for one evening.

When a mummer is correctly identified, they remove their mask. Then everyone has a drink.

Most mummering parties bring music with them. An accordion, a fiddle, a tin whistle, or — most distinctively — an ugly stick.

The ugly stick is a homemade percussion instrument. The base is a wooden broom or mop handle, often topped with a carved or painted face and a boot nailed to the bottom. Bottle caps, washers, and small bells are tacked along its length so that the whole thing rattles when it is bounced on the floor. It is, as one Mummers Festival participant cheerfully puts it, more of a noise-maker than a musical instrument.

The ugly stick survives because it costs nothing to make, sounds like a small kitchen disaster, and produces exactly the right kind of cheerful chaos for a mummering visit. It is also one of the easier ways to mark yourself as a mummer in an outdoor setting — the sound carries.

The other distinctive object you will see at any Newfoundland mummering event is the hobby horse.

The modern hobby horse is essentially a large folk puppet: a horse’s head with a hinged jaw that snaps open and shut, mounted on a stick, with a blanket draped behind it. A person ducks under the blanket, holds the stick, and operates the jaw with a string. Sometimes two people share the costume.

Hobby horses are far older than the Christmas association. They appear in Newfoundland records as far back as the 1500s, and earlier in the British folk traditions that the custom came from. In the older form, the head was sometimes an actual horse’s skull. In outport memory, the hobby horse was a creature parents used to discipline their children: be good and Santa will come; misbehave and the hobby horse will find you. It was never a friendly figure. The snapping jaw was meant to be alarming.

When the Mummers Festival was founded in 2009, one of the goals was to bring the hobby horse back. A folklorist named Ryan Davis worked with festival organizers to develop a cardboard pattern that anyone could build at a workshop. As one of the festival’s organizers later explained, the cardboard version is dramatically easier to produce than a real skull, which makes it possible to put a hobby horse in the hands of any child who wants one. The workshops are now an annual feature of the festival, and the cardboard horses have become one of its visual signatures.

It is a small, deliberate piece of cultural engineering: take an old object that was on its way out, replace its hardest-to-source material with something a child can cut with safety scissors, and watch the tradition propagate through a new generation.

The standard story of mummering — the version told in tourism brochures and children’s books — usually skips a hundred-year gap. There is a reason for it.

On the evening of December 28, 1860, a young fisherman named Isaac Mercer was walking home with his brothers-in-law in Bay Roberts, on the Avalon Peninsula. They encountered a group of masked mummers. What started as a confrontation escalated quickly. Mercer was beaten and died from his injuries.

The killing did not happen in a vacuum. The 1800s in Newfoundland were full of mummering-related violence. Disguise plus alcohol plus a year’s worth of unsettled grudges had a predictable arithmetic: people used the cover of a costume to attack people they had quarrels with. Mercer’s death was the case that finally pushed the colonial government to act.

The first attempt was a registration system — mummers would have to be issued numbers — and it failed almost immediately. So in June 1861 the legislature passed An Act to make further provisions for the prevention of nuisances. The law made it illegal to wear a disguise in public without written permission from a magistrate. It was a ban with teeth. Police could arrest mummers on sight in any town or city large enough to have police.

In St. John’s and the bigger settlements, mummering effectively died. The version of the tradition that had taken on a rowdy, semi-political edge — bands of masked working-class men roaming the streets, firing guns into the air, demanding free drinks in taverns — was gone within a generation. What survived, survived in the outports, where there were no constables to enforce the ban and where Christmas had always been a more communal affair.

The 1861 statute was not formally repealed until 1990. For roughly 130 years, walking through downtown St. John’s in a disguised costume was, technically, a crime. A surprising number of Newfoundlanders today still believe it is illegal — the law is gone, but the cultural memory of the ban has outlasted the ban itself.

For most of the twentieth century, mummering occupied a strange position in Newfoundland life. Officially illegal. In practice, alive and well in any community far enough from a courthouse to be left alone.

The fullest record of this period comes from an unusual source. In the 1960s, faculty at Memorial University of Newfoundland sent questionnaires home with English and Folklore students, asking them to interview people in their own communities about mummering customs. The project generated more than 1,200 responses. The variety in the answers — what was worn, what was eaten, who participated, when the visits happened — showed that “mummering” was never a single tradition but a loose family of practices that varied house to house and town to town. Folklorist Margaret Robertson later turned this archive into a 1984 thesis that remains one of the most detailed records of any folk custom in Atlantic Canada.

By the 1950s, the cultural mood had begun to shift. Older Newfoundlanders began speaking of mummering with nostalgia. Academics began treating it as a custom worth preserving rather than a public nuisance to be policed. But by the time the law was finally repealed in 1990, the practice itself was thinning. The cod moratorium of 1992 would soon push young people out of the outports, and the small communities that had kept mummering going were emptying.

The tradition was on the edge of becoming a historical footnote.

What pulled mummering back was, of all things, a pop song.

In 1982, a duo called Simani — Bud Davidge and Sim Savory — recorded “The Mummers Song.” The track opens with an older woman remembering past Christmases and missing the mummers who used to visit. Then there is a knock on the door. The rest of the song narrates a mummer visit in cheerful, accordion-driven detail.

It became one of the most successful regional records ever made in Newfoundland. The original title was Any Mummers ’Lowed In? — the traditional greeting at the door, asking permission to come inside. By the late 1980s, the song was so embedded in NL Christmas culture that it had effectively rewritten the public memory of the custom. Mummering went from “thing your grandmother used to do” to “thing you do, with this song playing.”

The revival picked up momentum again in the 2000s, when a folklore student at Memorial University named Ryan Davis decided that mummering deserved a public event of its own. In 2009, working with the Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador’s Intangible Cultural Heritage office, the first Mummers Festival was held in St. John’s.

The expectations were modest. As Davis later described it, the original idea was simply a parade — and the hope was that maybe a few dozen mummers might show up.

Three or four hundred people came to the first one.

The festival now runs every December and ends with a parade through the downtown streets. Spectators line Water Street; people open their doors and lean out to watch; entire families turn up in homemade disguises. It is a strange, full-circle moment. A custom criminalized for over a century is now organized by a heritage office, supported by Memorial University, and parades down the same streets that mummers were once arrested for using — with permits.

What happens at the parade itself is harder to convey than the history that produced it. One of the festival’s regular participants put it this way:

“All of a sudden, no one’s a stranger. You can talk to anyone. You can hook arms and dance with somebody. All the rules of everyday life disappear, and we get to have a party together with people we are meeting for the first time. It’s like a totally different world for an afternoon.”

That is, more or less, what the original outport custom did inside individual kitchens for two centuries — except now it happens at city scale, in public, on a single Saturday in December.

It is worth being precise about what has actually been recovered.

The folklorist Joy Fraser has pointed out that the modern revival is selective. The form of mummering that has come to stand in for the whole — the friendly house visit, the guessing game, the song-and-dance — is one of several forms that historically existed side by side. The street processions, the mummers’ plays with stock characters like Father Christmas and Beelzebub, the rougher and more politically charged versions associated with St. John’s working-class districts: most of these have not been brought back. What has been revived is the warmest and most domestic version, which fits more comfortably into a contemporary heritage festival than the version that produced the 1861 ban would.

This is not a criticism. Traditions always change when they are revived. But it is useful to know that the mummering you see at the parade today is not a direct continuation of the mummering that Isaac Mercer met on a Bay Roberts road in 1860. It is a deliberate reconstruction of one strand of a much wider, messier custom.

For visitors and CFAs who want to experience mummering, the most reliable opportunity is the Mummers Festival in St. John’s, held every December. The festival typically includes costume-making workshops, hobby horse workshops (cardboard, not skulls), a few smaller events around the city, and the closing parade.

Outside the festival, mummering still happens in homes — but it tends to happen between people who already know each other. Walking up to a stranger’s door in a pillowcase is not the move. The cultural agreement that makes the tradition work is that the people on both sides of the door know they are participating in the same game.

If you live in St. John’s and want to mummer for the first time, the parade is the entry point. Make a costume, find a bra, build an ugly stick, show up.

Most Christmas customs are designed to make the season feel safe — bright lights, predictable songs, warm rooms. Mummering does almost the opposite. It introduces strangers into the home, suspends the rules of recognition, lets people misbehave a little under the cover of disguise, and only restores the social order at the end of the visit. It is, in the technical folklorist sense, a winter ritual of inversion. The dark, cold months get a small controlled dose of strangeness, and then everyone goes back to being themselves.

That is probably why it survived a century of illegality. It does something that nothing else in the Christmas calendar quite does. And it is probably why a province that has lost so much else — the cod, the railway, half the outport population — has held onto this one with both hands.

Sources & Further Reading

  • Heritage Foundation of Newfoundland and Labrador — Mummering designation page
  • Memorial University Intangible Cultural Heritage Office — Mummering & Janneying archive
  • Margaret Robertson, The Newfoundland Mummers’ Christmas House-Visit (1984)
  • Joy Fraser, scholarship on Newfoundland folk revival
  • The Globe and Mail, “The dark history of mummering in Newfoundland and Labrador”
  • Heritage NL — Performing Arts entry on the 1861 ban
  • Simani, The Mummers Song (1982)
  • Banned Tradition, Recreated Tradition (Jaehong Jin, 2018) — short documentary, primary interviews with Mummers Festival organizers and participants

CFA Files documents Newfoundland from the perspective of someone who came from away. Photography and video by J. Jin Photography.

Updated on 2026-05-01  7751f6a
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