From Christmas to Krampus

Here it is almost the holidays again. If Halloween is in the rear view mirror, Christmas is coming head on at 90 miles an hour. In deciding what to write for the holiday and then some, blog, I  looked up Holidays that fall in November, December and stretching into January.

 Who knew there were so many celebrations from so many spiritual belief backgrounds in the winter season? No wonder we say Happy Holidays, Christmas just covers one of them!

I found: November 7th, Diwali, the Festival of Lights, a Hindu holiday;  November 21st, is the Prophet's birthday, a Muslim holiday; Hanukkah, December 3rd to the 10th, a Jewish holiday; December 21st, the winter Solstice; Christmas, December 25th, a Christian holiday; December 26th, to January 1st,  Kwanzaa, an African American holiday. My personal favorite will always be Saint Nicholas Day, December 6th.

It has deep joyful roots in my life going back to my childhood as a California kid, age 8, transported to a life in Germany, in cold  November. Talk about culture shock! I loved it, Germany at Christmas is magic time. We had nighttime Christmas markets, Advent wreaths, hot chestnut sellers, snow and  Saint Nicholas. To this day when I smell coal smoke in the winter I am transported right back to those cold snowy magical starry nights.

Home, in Bad Kreuznach. That speck on the first floor is our maid waving from our apartment.

Christmas day is reserved for the Christ Child but on December 6th, kids all over Europe put their shoes out for Saint Nick to fill with treats and small toys. Some families put out hay and apples for Saint Nick's horse, but I think I like our cookies and milk. I'd hate to have to figure out  how to indicate a horse had eaten up the hay.

One year, my parents somehow arranged for Saint Nick to come to our house on the evening of December 5th.  I didn't see him arrive so there may or may not have been a white horse involved, but he was traveling with the scariest guy I have ever seen. Seriously, the sweetest guy in Christendom showed up with a devil in tow. A real devil. dressed in black with giant horns and a huge bundle of switches and a wicker basket on his back to take bad children away in. I remember he was dressed in shaggy furs and had red eyes and pointed teeth. I was only nine and scared silly, I didn't sleep for days after that.

KRAMPUS!

The European Saint Nick was a real person, a bishop in Turkey in the 3rd Century, when the Christian church was still new and Christians were still  persecuted for their beliefs. He was born to a wealthy family and he gave away his inheritance to the poor by tossing gifts and money through open windows. Our use of stockings to hang up for Santa to fill comes from St Nick's overhearing a girl crying because she was going to be sold into prostitution. She could not marry because she had no dowry. Saint Nick tossed a bag of gold coins through an open window where it landed in her stocking hung up to dry. Her two sisters quickly hung up their stockings too and were also saved. To this day, the three gold globes on a pawnbroker's sign in Europe are said to represent the three bags of gold.

The European version of Santa Claus, is tall and slender and wears a long red robe and a bishop's mitre and he usually carries a crook. Our American version is taken from the Dutch version, Sinter Klaas and his switched to pants, which were called knickerbockers, which also came from the Dutch settlers. The famous illustrator Thomas Nast fattened him up and Clement Moore turned him into "a jolly old elf"

Saint Nicholas, the children's friend

In America, luckily we didn't import Krampus, but he's still a huge deal in Austria and Germany, where they have giant parades of perchten aka Krampus, designed to scared the bejeebers out of everyone. Here's a sample of a  krampus parade

Bonus, the devil on a motorcycle!

Who the heck is this guy anyway? Krampus means claw and he's supposedly the son of the Norse god of the underworld, Hel. Whatever he is, he's the remnant of a 1,500 year old pagan ritual designed to disperse the ghosts of winter. Church fathers couldn't get rid of the pagan ritual so like so many others, they bent it to their own ends, turning Krampus into the dark side of the Christian Saint Nick.

I think I'll keep my jolly roly poly Santa, thank you.