I learned a new word the other day: Krampus. My cartoonist friend Patrick from Canmore, Alberta mentioned the word in a Facebook post, prompting me to look it up. I found out that Krampus is the Anti-Santa, and he looks like the demonic creature from that scary movie Jeepers Creepers. I always assumed that if children were on the naughty end of the naughty-nice spectrum, Santa put coal in their stocking, and that was that. Getting dissed by Santa seems humiliating enough, right? Apparently, that’s the Disney version. Krampus is the dark little secret of Christmas, and it dates way back to the you-ve-got-to-be-tough-to-play-with-the-big-boys-Christmas-isn’t-for-pussies-or-whiners, nihilistic Germanic mythology. Remember, Hansel and Gretel, and that evil, deceptive witch who tried to eat them after their stepmother banishes them to the woods? Those Germans know how to tell character-building bedtime stories. According to Austrian folk lore, Krampus helps Santa out by roaming the streets shortly before Christmas to weed out bad and undeserving children. When he comes across a naughty child, he stuffs him or her in his bag, and takes them back to his lair, presumably to peel off their skin with his razor sharp teeth and eat them alive like string cheese. O.K., perhaps I extrapolate. It’s a win-win for Christmas, because Santa can then focus on being jolly and rewarding the truly deserving, while Krampus clears out all the bad karma AND gets enough meat to fill his freezer for the next year. Basically, it’s a Wes Craven movie with a happy ending. I say forget roaming the streets; just troll the toy section of any Wal-Mart, plenty of brats there. I wonder if Mr. Krampus could be persuaded to take out some of the naughty adults as well. How about eviscerating that greedy former CEO from Confederation Life featured on 60 Minutes a few weeks ago? Maybe he could give Bernie Madoff-with-the-money a nibble as well. Eat the rich; joy to the world. Occupy Wal-Mart!
Recently, I was at the supermarket reading the ingredients on the label of some seemingly healthful food, which, as it turns out it clearly was not, and in the background there was that canned Christmas music we hear everywhere. The Twelve Days of Christmas was playing, perhaps sung by Alvin and the Chipmunks, and I found myself involuntarily humming the tune as I read the ingredients. All those unpronounceable chemicals: “…on the fifth day of Christmas my can good gave to meeee, 12 grams of fat, monosodium glutamate, sodium bisulphate, nose hair of troll, and a flat-u-lence guar-an-tee. Don’t judge me, we all have different ways of coping during the holidays; this is mine.
Tomorrow night we light the first candles of Hanukkah (Quadaffi is the only name I know that has more spellings), so Happy Chanukah to all my fellow tribesmen, and a merry Kwanzaa, Christmas, etc. to the rest of you. While Christmas has never been a favorite of mine, mostly because it puts so much pressure on families to give and receive stuff, I do embrace the sputtering hope of universal goodwill. Any holiday can be an opportunity to open our hearts right? Any day of the year for that matter. I’ll probably call my friend Edmond who is homebound in Buffalo and pretty sick with MS to remind myself that his attitude is usually better than mine. All I want is what I’ve got, and maybe a little less. I leave you once again with the holiday exclamation I coined last year: Ho! Ho! Ho! and don’t be one! And remember kids, quit yer whining about that new XBox game you want or you may end as an hors d’ouevre at the Krampus Christmas party!
Peace on Earth … sounds good to me.
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