Believe it or not, I was searching for a Night Before Christmas kind of image and came across an illustration that took me down a rabbit hole. There is another Night Before Christmas story, written in the second volume of an 1832 collection of stories, Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka by Nikolai Gogol. It’s much darker than the lovely poem we read to our kids. It’s set in the Ukraine and begins with a witch flying across the sky and the devil stealing the moon and hiding it in his pocket. He wants the sky dark because he has a beef with a blacksmith of a small village and wants to be able to sneak up on him. When he comes down to the town to search for the blacksmith, he finds the witch, who hides him when townsfolk come searching for him. It’s a tale with twists. The blacksmith is in love with the village beauty, who sends him on a quest to steal the Tsarina’s slippers before she agrees to marry him. The witch ends up capturing the mayor and another man and hiding them in coal sacks. The blacksmith, after pretending to be dead, overpowers the devil, and forces him to fly him to see the tsarina (the future Catherine the Great), and she gives him the slippers. All ends well of course, and there is an opera dedicated to the story by Tchaikovsky…but Google it if you want to learn more.

In the meantime, I (and you) have learned there is another Night Before Christmas tale out there!

Solve the puzzle to see Solokha and the Devil! Then tell me whether you’d love to see the other Night Before Christmas story given a bit of sunlight so more people know about it! Would you prefer to see it in a film? Or rewritten as a children’s fairytale?