Step into the dark roots of Christmas past where the Krampus punishes the bad boys and girls.
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Christmas time is truly the darkest and creepiest time of the year filled with devilish creatures lurking in the shadows waiting to get us. Best known is the Krampus who has been the subject of films and songs. There was a time in the late 1800s when people sent Krampus cards, not holiday greetings. There are other violent and dangerous monsters from all over northern climes who have been hunting naughty children for centuries. From shapeshifters to mountain trolls, to elves, to heavy-handed cohorts of Saint Nicholas, the Christmas holiday has been filled with ghosts and monsters ready to dole out punishment to those who need it.
The Fright Before Christmas will delve into the folklore of Krampus and his friends with the elf-like Tomten and the goblinesque Karakoncolas. The Belsnickel is ready to hit us with his switch of sticks and Gryla may drag you back to her mountain lair. And watch out for the Yule Cat ready to pounce! These are just a few of the yuletide beasties coming for us in The Fright Before Christmas in the hope they can save us from ourselves.
The folklore roots of Christmas under its many other guises (Yule, the Winter Solstice, Saturnalia) is examined in a different, darker light. The Winter Solstice is a time to be afraid. It’s the shortest day of the year. The longest night. In some parts of the world, the sun doesn’t rise at all. It’s dark, and we have to wonder if the sun will ever come back at all. Christmas has always been creepy and with The Fright Before Christmas you’ll see the other side. This is a book for everyone who loves a little darkness around the holidays.
Be good or the Krampus will get you!
My favourite thing about ANY holiday is the weird and wonderful folklore that contributed to its creation and traditions, and Christmas is no different. In fact, Christmas may well be one of the creepiest times of year thanks to the darkness and universal dip toward poverty. Jeff Belanger, however, gives us real monsters to be afraid of during the holiday season! The Krampus, Grylla, the Yule Cat, Mari Lwyd, and even the Ghost of Jacob Marley are covered in exciting and spooky detail, but it’s not JUST a book about being afraid. What good is being afraid, if there’s no warmth and joy you can use to scare those monsters away? This book about scary monsters and ghosts is full of hope, humour, and some new ways of looking at Christmas and Yule that can warm even the most humbugged of hearts (*cough* mine *cough*).
I’m not normally one to listen to audiobooks- I find it hard to pay attention to 9 hours of book without being the one to do the reading- but I decided to give this one a try and I’m glad I did. It’s read by the author who not only shows passion for the material, but has a great voice for both the haunting and the heartfelt moments. With a run time around 3 hours, I listened to it in two installments right before bed and it made awesome bedtime stories in my dark room light by nothing but my Christmas tree. When I bought my audio copy, I noticed that the hard copy is full of illustrations and images punctuating each character and story so I also checked a copy out of the library to get a look at it, and promptly ordered a copy to add to my Christmas book collection! I have been saving and collecting all the little story books of Christmas tales and folklore since childhood (a big stack of them are literal pop-up books) and this is one I look forward to seeing under the tree every year from now on! The illustrations are well done and definitely make it easier to picture the monsters and characters featured, and every chapter has images from wacky Victorian greeting cards, classical art, and even a few photographs. This book is one that is fun to read, or have read to you, and that will be a great holiday decoration you can break out year after year.
Now let’s get to the really important part – the history, the legends, THE MONSTERS!
The Fright Before Christmas is split into three acts: Hope, Fear, and Redemption. In Act One: Hope, Jeff gives us the story of Christmas before and after the spread of Christianity. He talks about Yule, Saturnalia, and the Winter Solstice and how they shaped the European traditions that later inspired the Christian holiday. He also spent a whole chapter on Saint Nicholas, not Santa but the actual Saint and his legends, which I appreciated because the two figures get so wrapped up together that I often forget where one ends and the other begins. In Act Two: Fear the monsters of the yuletide season come out to play. Some I recognized, like Krampus, La Befana (my fellow Italian witch) and the Yule Cat, and others I had either never heard of or didn’t know much about like Grylla, the Belschnikel, and Mari Lwyd! I loved every single one of them! Some chapters had me laughing hysterically picturing these things creepy around the dark, while others had me shivering and clutching my cat for comfort. This act ended with Santa Claus, the jolly old elf, and a bit about A Christmas Carol and Dickens that had me crying almost as hard as I do when the Muppets show Scrooge the meaning of Christmas in the (objectively) best version of the tale. Finally we come to Act Three: Redemption. This rounds out the theme of the book which is the importance and benefit of feeling a bit of fear on the longest and darkest night of the year. All of these Christmas monsters come from colder climates, places that experience winter. As Jeff says in the book “In northern climates we live in three seasons: spring, summer, and fall. But we survive the winter.” and I can attest, as a Canadian, that this is very true. Though many of us have a lot more tools that help us do that, winter is still a time of cold, darkness, illness, and threats to our lives. I’ve lived in a place where the temperature regularly dipped below 45 degrees (at this temp Celsius and Fahrenheit become obsolete! fuck that!) and my current home which is the most tropical part of the country which is so humid that you can get frost bite at a measly -6 degrees Celsius. They’re both challenging and scary, and the grey days and long dark nights make mental health a little harder to hold on to. In times gone by, winter literally killed tons of people just because. Oops, snow collapsed your roof, oops it got extra cold, oops your food stores ran out before the snow did – DEAD. The coming of the dark and deadly winter brought us together in celebration and indignation (if you were a puritan), but mainly made us grateful for all we had and hold those things dear. The coming of winter allowed us to cut loose, to hold our loved ones close, and to revel in the bounty of all of our work throughout the year. This was the time when people felt truly alive. It also offered a chance to change and to be redeemed. The author points out that most folks don’t make a big change in their lives because everything is lovely and cheerful, they make the change because something scares them into it. This we know from the story of Ebeneezer Scrooge, which influenced a huge number of the Christmas traditions that persist today. It also led people to create heroes who could perform miracles through acts of kindness and love like Santa Claus, La Befana, and Saint Nicholas. The frightening facts of Christmas are what inspire us to be good, and that’s a message I can certainly get behind.
This book also taught me a little something that made me question some of my own negative feelings about the holiday. I’m a real Charlie Brown around Christmas and get super irritated with the commercialization and overall worshipping of capitalism that comes with it. I love giving gifts, but hate the stress that comes with the financial obligations of Christmas. People will really put themselves in debt to buy their kid unnecessary things with huge price tags, and stores will rip off hardworking people during a season that should be marked with goodwill. One of Ebeneezer Scrooge’s cardinal sins was putting profits before people, and it seems many haven’t learned their lessons from this ghost story! But at certain points in history over-spending at Christmas literally saved our lives. The stock market crashed in 1929 and plunged thousands of people into poverty, bankrupted even some of the richest people, and scared absolutely everyone. Unfortunately, the cure to this financial disease is spending. It seems crazy, because how can you spend money when you have none? Enter black friday and holiday advertising. I never knew why Black Friday was called that, I assumed it was because the sheer insanity was something to fear, but it is actually the day many businesses hoped to get back into the black, financially. Pushing folks to stop pinching their pennies this time of year provided big boosts to the economy and created more jobs for those who had been out of work for months or even years. The people who retained their wealth were encouraged by Dickens’s story to give more time off or to gift their employees with holiday feasts. The commercialization of Christmas not only helped bring the great depression to a close after 10 years, but provided tons of people with life-saving resources during the coldest and darkest time of the year. With house expensive everything is right now, especially food, providing more jobs all the way up the supply chain, getting people out of their homes and among their fellow man, and allowing people to feel useful and like they are well-off enough to share their bounty with others really is a much better thing than I realized.
I loved this book. I loved every chapter, every monster, every story, and every iteration of this holiday with which I’ve always had kind of a complicated relationship. It helped me look at it in a new way, it opened my heart, and it made me shut my eyes tight and hide under the covers lest the ghosts and beasts find me and see all the ways I’ve been naughty this year. This is most definitely a 5/5 but let’s go with something a little more festive than crystal balls, Krampuses!
👹👹👹👹👹/5!
So Merry Christmas, Io Saturnalia, Blessed Winter Solstice and Yule to you all but don’t forget Gruss Vom Krampus! (Krampus is coming!)
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Jeff Belanger is one of the most visible and prolific researchers of folklore and legends today. A natural storyteller, he’s the award-winning, Emmy-nominated host, writer, and producer of the New England Legends series on PBS and Amazon Prime, and is the author of over a dozen books (published in six languages). He also hosts the New England Legends weekly podcast, which has garnered over 4 million downloads since it was launched.
https://jeffbelanger.com/
Paige Vanderbeck, The Fat Feminist Witch 