Perchta Inspects the Kitchens

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The story

Frau Perchta arrives in a village one night before Epiphany with a clipboard, a long iron rod and a list of unfinished spinning. The storyteller describes how the careful housewife had finished everything, and Perchta praised her, then found one stray thread on the wheel.

How it begins

The village of Hollerbach sits in a fold of the hills, where the snow comes early and stays late and the church bell has a crack in it that gives every hymn a little hiccup. Nobody in Hollerbach had seen Frau Perchta in living memory, which was a comfort to everybody, because she was not the sort of visitor anybody wished to see. Most of the grandmothers agreed she had been dead for two hundred years. The rest of them preferred not to say anything at all about it. On the night before Epiphany, the snow fell in great soft sheets, and the lanes were blue with moonlight. A housewife…

The folklore behind it

• Frau Perchta