Like childhood and retirement, the Christmas holiday can never live up to its overblown hype. Personally, I’d be more than happy to see the whole thing canceled. But unless your family doesn’t celebrate, it’s hard to gracefully opt out, as having Christmas alone is looked upon with either incomprehension or pity.
So when a few years ago I first heard about Krampus, I knew I’d finally found a holiday and a figure after my own grinchy heart.
Although Krampusnacht is officially on December 5, in the US Krampus enjoys a loose affiliation with the holidays right up until Christmas. This is the time when Krampus the Bavarian Christmas demon accompanies Saint Nicholas on a holiday walking tour.
Bad children in America have it easy. Coal to scare you straight? In Bavaria, bad children are threatened with indentured servitude and being boiled into soup.
Krampus is both goat-like and man-like and much like the devil in appearance, with cloven hooves, curling horns and a lolling, serpentine tongue. Unlike Satan, however, Krampus does not tempt the innocent to sin and corruption but rather punishes the naughty for their wicked ways. He shakes chains in the faces of the badly behaved, swats their behinds with sticks or else carries them away in a sack. As he travels with Saint Nicholas, the bishop rewards good children with toys and sweets, while Krampus cracks his knuckles on the skulls of misbehaving nincompoops.
Santa Claus is toothless by comparison. Bad children in America have it easy. Coal to scare you straight? In Bavaria, bad children are threatened with indentured servitude and being boiled into soup.
Perhaps I like Krampus because I’m no fan of Christmas. I dislike the consumerism, the obligation, the compulsory well-wishing and the anachronism (has anyone since the time of Tolstoy ridden in a one-horse open sleigh?). It’s like being forced to go to Disneyland. Humbug.
I didn’t grow up with the story of Krampus. I didn’t really grow up with the story of Santa Claus either. Not because my parents didn’t try to foster superstition in their offspring — or because I was a particularly astute child — but because my older sisters explained that on Christmas Eve it was important to set out cookies and milk so Dad would give us presents. (As others lost faith in Santa, I still believed in my father.)
Maybe never having had that Santa belief, there was still space in my heart, into which Krampus jammed a hoof and set up shop in my aorta. I know that he comes as part of a package set, but between Saint Nick and Krampus, I’ll choose Krampus every time. Krampus, the wily half-child of brimstone and a Toggenburg goat, and not dear, sweet Saint Nicholas, the kindly bishop with all the personality of a canned yam.
Don’t get me wrong — who doesn’t like toys and sweets? But could either hold a candle to the suggestive verve of branches and chains and that lascivious Gene Simmons tongue? O Krampus, you anti-Santa. I get a jolt of guilty pleasure every time I imagine the Bavarian demon waterboarding an elf.
I realize Krampusnacht is the latest “it” holiday ripe for ironic hipster appropriation, but considering that there was a very real effort in the Fatherland to stamp him out, I applaud his furious rebirth and ongoing evolution. Even if it was never a part of my own childhood, Krampusnacht is a holiday I can actually get excited about. I like the irreverence, the silly costumes and the Krampuslauf — the drunken sprees where people dress up as devils and run through the streets. (Speaking of which, San Francisco is having one of its own this year, and Oakland will be hosting the Bay Area Krampus Krawl.)
Krampus — like the Catalan Caganer — is an openly absurd middle finger to the self-seriousness of figures like Saint Nicholas and Jesus. Just thinking about Krampus puts me in the same good mood that others get into by listening to Bing Crosby croon about sleigh bells and Santa. The thoughts fill me with joy and relief. Given the nausea induced by this past November — hell, by 2016 as a whole — it’s just so much easier, and more comforting really, to believe in a cantankerous half-goat demon who will chase down the wicked and shake them good than it is to believe in a trespassing old man who watches children as they sleep.
More details and info on Krampus festivities in the Bay Area:
San Francisco’s
Krampus Cross Country 5K (Sunday, December 11th)
Oakland’s
Krampus Krawl (December 10th)
