Greer - Santa, Schmanta - What The World Needs Now Is . . . Krampus!
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First, though, my wish list. In honor of the holiday season just past, we can call it a solstice list—those of my readers who celebrate Christmas instead can call it a Christmas list if they wish. Still, I’d like to ask that the list not be sent to Santa Claus. No, this list is for Krampus.
Krampus? He’s a Yuletide figure across much of central Europe. Horned, clawed, covered with shaggy black hair, and equipped with a long red tongue, he carries a birch switch, has a basket on his back, and visits houses on long winter nights. Good little children wake to find gold coins in their shoes; bad little children get thwacked with the birch switch; and really, really bad little children—the sort of spoiled, shrieking little horrors who take consumer society’s cult of self-centered greed to its logical extreme—get popped into the basket on Krampus’s back and taken away by him, and nobody ever sees them again. I suspect that lingering belief in Krampus may be one reason why children in central Europe are by and large better behaved than their American equivalents. Krampus, in other words, is all about consequences. That in itself arguably makes him a better Yuletide figure than Santa Claus, whose ancient custom of putting a lump of coal in the stockings of offensive children is hardly even a memory these days. Still, that’s only part of the reason I propose to send my wish list to Krampus.
The fact of the matter is that I’ve been bedeviled by Krampus over the holiday season just past. Part of that’s due to the publication of a new fantasy novel, Krampus the Yule Lord, in which the horned Yuletide spirit escapes from half a millennium of imprisonment to do battle with Santa Claus for dominion over the holiday season: something, that is, like a cross between A Christmas Carol and Prometheus Unbound. It’s got a portrait of Krampus on the front cover, and for months, when I visited libraries or walked past bookstores or waited in train stations next to one of those wretched little newsstands with a few books tucked in among the junk food and the magazines, there he’d be, leering out from the shelves. Meanwhile Krampus-themed holiday cards arrived from friends, as did emails from other friends asking me if I’d ever heard about...well, you get the picture.
Mind you, in my line of work, you learn early on how to recognize when an archetype is trying to get your attention. Why exactly this particular archetype is clearing its throat and casting significant looks in the direction of a mild and middle-aged archdruid is something that I’ll doubtless figure out in due time. Meanwhile, though, it seems sensible enough to offer Krampus my wish list for next Yuletide, or whichever Yuletide is convenient; perhaps he can cash in some of those gold coins for a few research grants to get the process rolling.
EDIT
http://www.resilience.org/stories/2013-01-09/a-wish-list-for-krampus
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