Doll-A-Day 2023 #77: La Befana

  Today's doll is this lady.

  She's La Befana.

I know it looks like it says 'La Bufana', but if you Google that you get corrected to 'La Befana'.

    She's about 12 inches tall, with a plain cheap plastic body with non movable limbs, and an attached stand.

  In Italian folklore, La Befana is a sort of equivalent of Santa Claus or Father Christmas. She delivers candy, toys or fruit to good children on the night before Epiphany, while bad children receive 'dark candy', (What's that?! Sounds creepy!), onions, garlic, or coal, (or, in poorer regions, a stick instead of coal. Hey. They both burn.) That accounts for the bag she carries.

  There are variations to the folk tale about why La Befena does what she does.  Variations include:

   The Three Wise Men ask at La Befana's house if she knows where Christ has been born, and invite her along on their search. She refuses because she has housework to do, But she later changes her mind and goes after them.  

She turns them away because she's too busy cleaning, but feels guilty and goes after them.

She turns them away because she's cleaning, but then goes after them, taking a bag of gifts for the baby Jesus and a broom for his mother to  clean with, but never finds them. She's still searching, which is why she still has the bag and the broom. She leaves gifts for every child because there's Christ to be found in all children.

She lost a son, and went mad. When she hears of Christ's birth she goes looking for him because she thinks he's her son, and she takes him gifts. In return he makes her 'the mother of all the children in Italy.'

She is depicted as flying on her broomstick, and she uses it to sweep up the soot, after she enters the children's houses by way of the chimney, like Santa Claus.

The broom is to sweep away all the worries of the year, for a new start.

  Similar to Santa Claus, La Befana is also left a glass of drink, (In her case, it's wine, but she is Italian.), and a small plate of food.

This particular doll looks to have been a souvenir from Italy.

Glass?

  The tradition of Befana is thought to have been started in Rome. The name, Befana is possibly derived from a mispronunciation of the Greek word for Epiphany, 'epiphania'.

  That's the doll for today. See you tomorrow for another one.