In Newfoundland, Canada, visiting houses in disguise during Christmas is called mummering.
Mummering is a Newfoundland and Labrador Christmas custom in which groups of friends or relatives disguise themselves and travel from house to house during the Twelve Days of Christmas. They may wear old clothes, masks, scarves, pillowcases, or improvised costumes, sometimes changing their voices or pretending to be another gender to make recognition difficult.
At each home, the hosts try to identify the visitors. Before being recognized, the mummers may sing, dance, play instruments, tell jokes, or perform short recitations. Once their identities are guessed, they usually reveal themselves, share food and drinks, and continue to another house. This guessing-game element is what distinguishes the tradition from ordinary caroling.
The custom has English and Irish roots and was recorded in Newfoundland as early as 1819. It declined in some communities after nineteenth-century controversies over masked groups, but experienced a revival in the late twentieth century. Today, festivals and parades help preserve mummering as a distinctive part of Newfoundland’s Christmas heritage.