E-Mail This Article to a Friend Into the dark Christmas Revels embarks for Scotland BY NINA MACLAUGHLIN

Next Friday brings the 33rd annual return of Christmas Revels to Sanders Theatre. Celebrating the winter-solstice traditions of cultures around the world, Revels represents a distinctively Cantabrigian Christmas tradition (though it now exists in cities across the country). As always, audiences can expect song, dance, drama, and the ritual "Lord of the Dance," when performers and audience members join hands and sing and dance through the aisles and into the vestibule of Memorial Hall.

This year, Christmas Revels takes audiences to Scotland. So what’s distinctive about the holiday there? Well, for one thing, the Scots don’t really celebrate Christmas. December 25 has been an official Scottish holiday only since the 1950s. Scots reserve their mischief, mirth, and merriment for Hogmanay — that’s New Year’s Eve to you Sassenachs (Saxons). Be that as it may, explains Revels artistic director Patrick Swanson, Scotland has a suite of traditions to mark the darkest, coldest days. The 80-member Revels cast will include Scottish fiddle champ Emerald Forman, the Laird’s Consort, the Revels Bairns children’s chorus, and the Auld Reekie Singers, who take their name from Edinburgh’s "Old Smoky" nickname.

But whereas England has the tradition of mumming — with performers going house to house to put on folk plays about St. George — the Scots have guising. This year’s Christmas Revels includes a Guisers play about the great and wild knight Galoshin, who’s killed in slapstick swordplay and then brought back to life. Disguised in costumes, Guisers went farm to farm, bursting into homes and performing plays on the kitchen floor; the purpose was to bring luck to the family. "The business of bringing someone dead to life is always good luck when your livelihood revolves around seeds coming to life," Swanson explains, adding that as part of a "visiting tradition," guising is consistent with a Scottish sense of misrule around the new year, a bit of edginess and mischief. "There’s a license to do things. People wander the streets and blow their horns. People are more inebriated than usual, drinking a bit more whiskey."

And though this Christmas Revels will reel with the low art of Scottish farms and villages, it will also lilt with the high art of the 18th-century court of Edinburgh. "There are a lot of preconceptions of what is Scottish," Swanson notes. "And one of my ambitions is that some of those preconceptions get disturbed a bit. You expect bagpipes and kilts, but maybe not a harpsichord." He compares the court in Edinburgh to that of Versailles, pointing out that "the beginnings of ballet emerged in parallel with Scottish dance."

Although not immune to commercialism, the Scots’ traditions center on the time of year when things were frozen and food was traditionally scarce. What makes the Scottish Revels interesting, Swanson says, "is the dark side of it. In modern Christmas celebrations, we lose that dangerous quality. In the Hallmark, Disney version, that darkness gets lost."

Christmas Revels runs December 12 through 30 at Sanders Theatre, 45 Quincy Street in Harvard Square. Tickets are $20 to $40, $12 to $32 for children under 12; call (617) 496-2222 or visit www.revels.org.