As I type, you have technically less than six days to get your proverbial Christmas shit together or come the evening of December 24th, you’ll be forced deal with……
KRAMPUS!!!!!!!!!
To be more specific, this menacing looking dude:
Krampus was new to me until a campy movie of the same name was released about six years ago. I watched it for the first time not long ago. Now, these kinds of flicks aren’t my usual forms of cinematic entertainment, at least not since joining AARP, but it was a hot, balmy Thursday morning in October, and I was bored to tears and flipping through 887 channels of satellite yawn fest, landed on Krampus and started watching. I quickly became invested its pathos and ethos and the tube of Mentos I was eating.
I won’t lie—it’s a silly film that’s well, interesting in a way. It has periodic bursts of dark humor which will always entertain me long enough to keep the remote out of my hand for an hour and 38 minutes.
Krampus, the legend as best I can tell, comes to us from various legends that have long swirled around holiday time in Europe, from as far west as Germany and Northern Italy, and eastward to Croatia. Krampus IS the ultimate cautionary tale for kids—adults, too. As the story goes, he’ll incur his evil wrath on December 24th on anyone who loses their Christmas spirit, which according to Krampus, is easily defined: it’s giving more than taking, specifically mentioning the sacrifice involved giving. It’s believing in the inherent good in people and in the prospect of miracles, even under the gloomiest and most dire of circumstances. If Krampus and his ugly minions feel you don’t have the proper Christmas spirit and belief system, these judgmental monsters will ensure there’ll be hell to pay. Literally.
Folklore tells us that Krampus is a tall, horned figure that perpetually keeps his mouth open to show his scary, gnarly fangs. He’s an imposing looking thing that’s half-goat, half-demon with cloven hooves. He’s wrapped in chains, thought to symbolize the perpetual connection to the Devil—a la the ghost of Jacob Marley, though I think Dickens meant the chains to represent his devotion to his job and little else.
Sometimes Krampus appears with a black sack or a basket or crudely built cage strapped to his back. Legend says he uses these to snatch bad children from their homes in order to drown them, eat them or deliver them non-stop to the closet portal to Hell, such as say…..Vilnius, perhaps.
Lovely.
Krampus, as you might have deduced by now, is at the opposite end of the benevolent spectrum where the kindly, jolly, old St. Nicholas dwells. St. Nick gave birth to the story of Santa Claus and all the variations there in. For example, he’s called Father Christmas in the U.K., Père Noël in France and kids in Athens call him Άγιος Βασίλης, but that’s completely Greek to me.
The origin of the figure is unclear; some folklorists and anthropologists postulate its pre-Christian origin. So, maybe Krampus’ roots have nothing to do with Christmas. Some sources say the horned one dates back to pre-Germanic paganism in the region. His name originates with the German word “ krampen”, which I assumed was Tuetonic for the monthly pain I experienced as a much younger woman, but no—it means “claw”, which is interesting since imagery shows he has cloven hooves.
Some say its traditions can be traced back to Norse mythology. Some references I checked say Krampus is the son of Hel, the Norse god of the underworld. However, Wikipedia failed to tell me how it locked horns with Christmas and spread throughout Europe. I would imagine the diaspora of the tale was eventually spread among generations of desperate parents throughout Christian Europe who needed an affective con job that at least once a year, could turn unruly children into little saints.
Well, there you go. You now have an Associates Degree in all things Krampus.
As for the eponymous film, it takes place in a nice, Middle Class neighborhood at Christmas in the midst of the mother of all snowstorms. We meet a family waiting for extended family to invade their home for the holidays. The visiting family is just dreadful. The members, as a whole, remind me of Clark Griswold’s Cousin Eddie, though not as nice. The rest of the movie is about lots of snow, power outages, missing children, guns, angry & vengeful Christmas cookies that speak, the pits of hell, and a sad, forlorn, live-in grandmother of European descent who knows all about Krampus, but never fully explains what he is or why he’s TOTALLY peeing all over their holiday.
So, with Christmas less than a scant week away, you might have missed the Krampus holiday programming putsch, er….uh…I mean, push. Check your local listings. But, if you miss it, fear not. Next Labor Day, when radio stations, Sirius satellite, The Hallmark Channel and Hobby Lobby go full on with Christmas programming and Merchandising mode, keep the movie, Krampus in mind.
After all the Christmas staples which tell your kids that Rudolph Saves Christmas, that Santa Claus Is Coming To Town or when Bing Crosby croons that he’s dreaming of a White Christmas, go to Netflix or A-Prime and rent Krampus and make the kiddos watch it; especially the unruly ones who defy the lyrics in that classic Santa Claus song by pouting, shouting, crying and refusing to watch out despite telling them why. And add to the experience, by making them watch it late at night, in the dark, all alone, preferably during a thunderstorm and with limited bathroom access.
Make them watch it twice if you have to. And maybe, just maybe, the next day, you just may find that little Bethany and Ferguson have become the reincarnations of Mother Theresa or Albert Schweitzer.
At least until December 26th.
