Bittersweet Infamy - #33 - Krampus and His Kin

Episode Date: December 12, 2021

Holiday special! Taylor tells Josie about Krampus, St. Nicholas, Frau Perchta, and the other big names in dark Alpine holiday folklore. Plus: the story behind Holiday Halftime, the NFL's failed series of Christmas albums.

Welcome to Bittersweet Infamy. I'm Josie Mitchell. I'm Taylor Basso. On this podcast, we tell the stories that live on in infamy, the shocking, the unbelievable, and the unforgettable. The truth may be bitter, but the stories are always sweet. Taylor, your grandma's favorite Christmas album is Bonilla. Is that right? Bonilla, yes. Bonilla. Bonilla. Okay. Rasputin, Lover of the Russian Queen, but more accurately it was this Christmas cassette that had the scariest version of I'll Be Home for Christmas you've ever heard in your life. Oh. It has this really distinctive like disco polka backbeat that goes like...

And then I swear to God, Freddy Krueger steps in, I'll be home for Christmas. And you're like, I hope you're not. I actually hope that you're not home for Christmas, man. I hope you don't show up, dude. Whoa, that's spooky. But that's a good memory. Good for you. Did you know that there's a Star Wars Christmas album? Christmas and the Stars? No, but it doesn't surprise me. There's a hit on that album called What Would You Get a Wookie for Christmas in parentheses when he already owns a comb? That's sweet. I like wookies. Wookies are very cute.

It's cute. It's wildly awful though, the album. Is that so? Like Christmas wasn't even in the long, long ago era of Star Wars. I don't get it. Like it was before Christ, right? Like the Tilti script is in a galaxy long, long ago. The magic of Christmas transcends the literal Christ figure, I think. I think that there's, you know, you've got Christmas in the literal sense, and then you've got, if I wish really hard to Santa, maybe my parents will get back together, which has nothing to do with any of that. And that certainly exists in the Star Wars world,

I would think. Okay, okay, okay. All right, all right, I get that. You know, there's a lot of like beep, beep, boop, boops on it. And yeah, pretty bad. Pretty bad stuff. Speaking of other Christmas albums, Barbra Streisand, patron saint of bittersweet. The very same. Has some killer Christmas albums. Okay. And as I was researching some Christmas albums, it was pointed out to me, oh yeah, Babs is Jewish. Which, I mean, whatever. But I just like did not put the two together. I've known her Christmas albums for a long time, and I've like heard them often. But I was like, oh,

oh yeah. But you know. Listen, I think that Babs has such a presence and a voice so suited to Christmas music that she would be- It's true. She would be leaving money on the table not to indulge in this bit of cultural exchange. Plus there's lots of Jewish people who observe Christmas for whatever reason, you know. Totally. She totally has a Christmas shop in her basement. Right, exactly. Hands down, hands down. Year-round Christmas shop. But I'm, today I'm gonna bring you a Christmas album that I can like 99.999 guarantee that you

have not heard of. There's always that .0001, isn't there? That's true. That's true. I'm gonna play you a brief little snippet of this. Okay. So... Don't forget you're wearing your headphones. Correct, thank you. Okay. Is that striking any bells? No, I thought that slap though. I fucked that up.

Yeah, that was pretty good. Is that like the murderer and like rapists choir and I just now I look like an idiot for supporting their musical endeavors? No, no. I wouldn't do that to you. Maybe I would, but not this time. That is one of 26 Christmas albums all with the same title, Holiday Halftime. Okay. So the Holiday Halftime series of records featured all 26 teams of the 1970 NFL lineup

singing Christmas classics like Deck the Halls, which we just heard, Frosty the Snowman. All I want for Christmas is my two front teeth and an original composition by producers Tropical Winter. How the hell did this happen and why have you never heard of not one of these 26 albums? I'm gonna tell you why. Okay. Yeah, fuck it up. Let's go. This is fun. Because when I heard that, I was like, sounds like some bros yelling a Christmas carol, but they put a good beat on it. I'm enjoying it.

I think you've described it pretty well. That's a pretty, I don't know, pretty concise review right there. There wasn't a lot of harmonizing going on there, but it was fun. I liked it. So the series of records were this brainchild of a New York ad executive and his name was Mike Tatchit. Okay. And he was known in the business for producing TV commercials that were popular in the 60s and 70s, which you could probably kind of hear that vibe there. Yes. For sure. It's kind of sounded like a chorus line in parts.

Exactly. No, boom. Exactly. And so he did these series called like, you know, Insert Beloved Singer Sings the Classics. So it would be like, Tony Bennett Sings the Classics, like that kind of thing. But let me be clear here. He produced the commercials for the albums, not the albums themselves. So commercials for albums. Okay. Which, you know, close enough, I guess. No, same, same. Same, same. Tatchit got in touch with some people at the NFL, and they were excited by the project,

because 1970 was the year of the official merger between the AFL, the American Football League, and the NFL, the National Football League. And so I guess I didn't know this, but the league had been separated in 1966. They decided to bring it together, but it didn't actually happen until 70. And there were there were a lot of fans who did not like it. There was a lot of like this, um, anxious, you know, this being sorry, this, this being the height of the Cold War, I assume that the schism between the two was communist and capitalist lines. It was most likely, yes. And then, okay, good. There's some iron curtain shit happening when the NFL is, you know, and

then the, the AFL, this is not a good bid. I don't know why I'm keeping it going. Let's continue. I love it. I mean, what could bring, you know, what could bring the Cold War to an end but Christmas, right? And football. And football, yeah. So the NFL was excited by it because they needed some camaraderie publicity, you know, they needed like all the boys together, you know, that kind of vibe. Right. So when I say that the NFL was excited, I just mean that they turned to tax it and they're like,

sure, go for it. And they didn't provide much help besides the team schedules. Yeah, but what do they need to give him? Well, I mean, they could find a composer or producer, you know, a producer. Well, I know this is Tatchett's passion project. He's got a commercial about, he'll figure it out. And, and it certainly was his passion project. So when he pitched it to the NFL, he didn't have all the pieces in place. It was more like, what about this? And when the NFL was like, yeah, sure, he had to scramble to get everything ready. So he quickly found a composer in Jacques Urbant, or Jack Urbant, whose credits include the Mission Impossible theme.

Very good. And the theme music for the Marvel Superheroes cartoon. Okay. Plus, Urbant knew where to get the music recorded on the cheap. Insider, insider. So this is a direct quote from Jacques Urbant. He says, maybe I shouldn't be saying this because I am a union member and as a union member, we're supposed to record in America. But what we did was recording Yugoslavia.

All those music tracks were done in Belgrade. You can hire the musicians in Yugoslavia for maybe like $40 a day. Oh, beautiful. They did it in the summer. And apparently, all the best musicians were in Dubrovnik for the summer, so they couldn't get, you know, top of the heap. But they had a good orchestra. No. I don't, and I'm not, I, there are great musicians in Yugoslavia as there are. I mean, not anymore because Yugoslavia doesn't exist anymore. But you know what I mean. There's great musicians everywhere in the world. I'm just laughing because this is funny. I'm just laughing because I'm enjoying myself. Yeah. Happy holidays. We haven't even said this, by the way. Happy holidays, everybody. If you celebrate Hanukkah, happy Hanukkah. If

you celebrate Christmas, Merry Christmas. If you don't celebrate anything, we celebrate you. So Oh, that was good. Thank you. I'm good with these things about Christmas and Hanukkah. Never mind. I'm not. I like it. I like it. So Taksha and Urbant, they take just a few days to record all the music in Belgrade and Belgrad. And then they fly back to the US to record the vocals. So it's August and they need to hit every NFL team before the preseason is over. The NFL has asked them like, you can't do it during the season. You got to do it during training. That's fair. I totally fair. So Taksha and Urbant split the teams up and they work as quickly as they can. They traveled over

25,000 miles and recorded over 1,000 football players voices. So this is like an ethnographic project. Almost. Yes. Musicology right here. No musicology. Yes. It was a logistical nightmare because they could only record in five hour chunks of time. They couldn't they didn't have like, oh, three days to do it. They had to like get them before or after practice. And all the recording studios had to be close by to training facilities. They didn't have the ability of the like fly mod in New York or LA or whatever. And most daunting was the colossal task of convincing hundreds of exhausted NFL players to actually try and sing Christmas songs. These men who have absolutely no training in singing. So the only way they could do it, maybe not the only way,

but the way that they did do it was they turned the recording sessions into these big parties. Yeah, you'd have to you'd have. They stocked it with beer and pizza and sandwiches. That's the way to do it. That's totally the way to do it. And the composer Jacques Urbant said he gained about eight pounds in six weeks. So the St. Petersburg Times on September 1, 1970 did a little write up about some of the recording. And this was part of the newspaper article. And the reporter is there at the recording session. And the article says winter wonderland was next. And it was a toughie. Conductor Urbant stopped the music and asked, where's the bad voice? All 30 players raised their hands.

You're so sweet. I love that. You know the football players who don't realize they're dead in Beetlejuice? Yeah. That's the vibe here. So Urbant and Taksha do manage to get all 26, 26 holiday halftime albums recorded. Why are they recording 20? So this is one for each team. One for each team. Yeah. What? No, wait. No, okay. So let's go back because I've missed that. They're doing 26 albums. 26 albums. So what I thought you said early on, just to be clear, I thought you were like,

oh, they did 20, like for 26 years, they did one a year and each team contributed a song. They did 26 albums in one year, one for each team. Taksha's passion project was very passionate. Yes. Within the span of six weeks, they recorded all 26 teams singing the same songs. Why not do what? What the fuck? I don't know. They wanted, I guess the NFL wanted every team to do it. I'm sorry I didn't clock this earlier. No, dude. It's okay. So the idea is, the idea is, okay, the idea is,

I'm trying to get, this is empathy. This is active empathy. Okay, okay, okay. Inaction, empathy in action. The idea is that it's coming. The idea is that by releasing one album for each team, we will be able to capture the die-hard fans of each team. This person who loves the Atlanta Falcons will go and buy the Atlanta Falcons album. This person who loves the Miami Dolphins will go and buy the Miami Dolphins album. Whereas if we just did one album with each team contributing a song,

let's say, make it like a double album, if we have space concerns, people would buy that less because they don't want to listen to football players they don't like. I don't get it. That's where I just do one album. Yeah. No, I think your logic there, and it follows the trajectory of bringing the league together, you know, and getting players across teams. You should have them mixed up. You should have the AFL players kissing the NFL players on the mouth on your front. I'm great at marketing. Middle America. You should have been in charge, dude. I was the CEO of QVC for one day, and then they kicked me out.

But what a glorious day, right? They said you're selling a lot of Lars von Trier NFTs, sir. I don't think Middle America wants this. But you got there. That's what matters. That's what I'm saying. That line on your CV can never be erased. No, they've tried. So not only is this task ridiculously large, but they hit a major snag when it comes time to get the records in actual stores. So, yes, because this is holiday specific. Holiday specific, yes. Taxi had decided that he would do all the distribution himself. His background is in making commercials for albums, and he has no real ends. He has no supply chain shit. He is, however, able to get some of the players on the Ed Elevent Ed.

He is, however, able to get some of the players on the Ed Sullivan show. And this one is cross teams. Like, it's a few players from different teams, and they sing. They didn't book 26 appearances. Just real quick, like a minute, minute, minute, minute, minute, minute. Duck next. They sing All I Want for Christmas is my two front teeth. And, well, wait for this, because as they sing, the images that are played on the TV are clips of brutal to the face circles. So the hits sync up when the players sing teeth. All I Want for Christmas is my two front teeth. Sing. That's amazing. I love that. I love it. And this is no notes.

No notes. No notes. Perfect as it is. Send it out. And this is like old school football, too. So we're talking like bone cracking hits. To give you an idea, Jim Otto, who played for the Oakland Raiders, he sang on the Raiders album, but also he was on the Ed Elevent show. And by the time his career ended, I can't why can't I see that right? We're letting go. I'm keeping it. Keep it. Keep it. Okay. He's saying on the album and on the Ed Sullivan show, by the time that his career ended, he had 74 surgeries from football related injuries, including the amputation of one of his legs. Poor guy. Jesus. I know. No, very intense. You can't accuse him of not leaving it on the

field. No. And he also can be quoted as saying, like, I don't know how I am not early all timers dead on arrival. Like, yeah, but so it's it's like that intensity of these hits being played over the sound of the football players singing, I want for Christmas is my two front teeth. That's a riot. What a good idea. That's so fucking disturbing. So despite the Ed Sullivan press, the records never sell. Taxi holds onto them for years afterward, keeping them in a storage facility in Jackson Heights. And he would attempt to sell one every once in a while. But most of the records never made it out of storage. Oh, that's so sad. I I I became so churned by the story that I forgot what a terrible idea it

was. And of course, they didn't sell any. That's so sad. The financial failure was even more bitter because tax shit. When things had gotten started, he had the opportunity to cash in early, but he refused. It was his passion project, right? Oh, I've seen so many of this man on Dragon's Den in Shark Tank. It's rough. It's always so sad. So sad. His son is quoted as saying Columbia records or someone came in and said, look, walk away from it, give it to us, and we'll give you a million dollars. And tax, it said, Oh, no, we're gonna make so much more than that. Oh my God. And this is like 1970 million dollars, too. I can see kind of how he got there in on on paper on paper. Let's do some football themed Christmas albums. Not a terrible idea.

It just got away from him a little. I think just yeah, he didn't know when to ask for help. I think it's also again, I'm not to not to keep banging this drum one album, one album. Yeah, you do one album and you solve like half your logistical problems. Yeah, no, I think that's totally true. Totally true. In the end, most of the records end up being sold to scrappers for the final. Even now, you can still find them on eBay as collector's albums. But the most expensive one I saw was for the Pittsburgh Steelers, and it went for $180. Okay. Which is, you know, that's yeah. But I mean, most of them were like in the $30 to $50 range. That's reasonable for a piece of catch of this variety. Yeah, yeah. And they all have the same cover. It's all it's like a cartoon

sketch of football players, like with red and green and like Santa hats and stuff like that. And they're like in a in a tackle. All the same songs. All the same songs. And it says holiday halftime at the top. But then at the very top, it changes the name. So it's like the Steelers sing holiday halftime. The Chargers sing the Raiders sing. And it's all same font, same everything, but that you really need 26 different versions of bros barking jingle bells on vinyl. Truly, truly. But you know what? It's it's not about the money. It's about the Christmas spirit. Yes. And as as the back of the album reads, the real stars of the album are the players of the National Football League who were called on to do something way out of their element. And they did

it. And they did it well. Now, from all of us at manless records, and from all of the players in the National Football League, we wish you a very happy holiday season. Mike, touch it. So long since I could say Hogtown, the sixth or Toronto. Whatever you call it, you can fly nonstop to Toronto on Porter Airlines. When you fly Porter, you'll enjoy free fast Wi-Fi and beer, wine and premium snacks included with every fare. You'll also love that our planes have no middle seats. Discover why Porter has been Eastern Canada's favorite airline for the last 16 years. Visit flyporter.com. Porter actually enjoy economy.

What do you usually do on Christmas? I'm usually with my family. I'm usually I stay over I we visit my grandparents on Christmas Eve. When my Spanish grandparents were alive, we would visit them during the day on Christmas Eve. And then we would visit my other grandparents, my father's parents, and have dinner there on Christmas Eve. And then we come together on Christmas Day, the kind of immediate family. Okay. My grandparents on my father's side, I often mention my Spanish side, my family, because I speak a bit of Spanish and that's the only other language that I speak. My grandparents on my father's side, his dad is Italian. And his mother was born in what is now Slovenia. Oh, I didn't know that. Yes. And has over

the years been kind of many other countries along the way. And so she grows up kind of moving around a lot because of the war, right? She's born in the 30s. Because of that, her experience of even things like this, even things like Christmas is different, right? But we have like a very by the book Christmas at that place. It's not like, you know, we're not doing any of the old school stuff. But sometimes she kind of tells us stories about that. Oh, that's cool. It's one winter. And this could have been any time between when I was like, seven and 14 years old. I have no idea. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, what's the difference? Yeah. One Christmas Eve, we're there and we're chatting and she's like, Oh, you know, da, da, da, da. And she's, she's telling stories

about old country as you do. And she mentions that when she was a kid, she was attacked by the Krampus. And yes. And so this is before now everybody knows what the Krampus is. Because because of the horror film, there's been this. Is that it? Yes. There's been this 2015 horror movie that I mean, I'll talk a bit about it. Oh, you mean in your episode? Oh, yeah. Krampus, baby. Krampus. Oh, shit. Oh, shit. Krampus. I don't really see the need to go any further because I wasn't there. I can't describe it to you. So we have a special treat. My grandmother, a Krampus survivor, her name is Linda, and she will tell you a bit of a story about that. So the context of this clip is, it's just a conversation between me and her. It kind of picks up mid conversation when

I realized, Oh, I could, I could literally just get this right now for the podcast. And it's her describing being assailed by the Krampus as a child. Much because we didn't get nothing. We got an orange and we would save that orange because we never saw an orange. We would save that orange until it went rotten and then we couldn't eat it. So we heard this rattling of chains all the way coming, coming closer and closer and closer. Well, we all ran underneath the bed and we got as close to the wall because the bed was up against the wall. It wasn't in the middle of the room like it was up against the wall. And we all went as close to the wall as we could get. And he would come into the house. He would come looking for us.

He knew exactly where we were. Of course, I think it was our dad or somebody, you know, who was who was we all? Like how many of you were there? My brothers, my brother, two brothers and my sister and me. Okay. Four. Did you ever see so you heard the rattling of the chains? Did you ever see? We know what he looked like. He come with a pitchfork. With a pitchfork? He come with a pitchfork and you know what they do, hey and yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. A pitchfork and a big chain, a big, thick chain like that thing. Where are we in this story? In Germany. In Germany, okay. Yeah. And he would swing that chain underneath the bed, make sure and he hit us and it hurt. Did you, did you remember, did you get hit by it? Yes. Where did you get hit by it?

On the legs. Okay. Because I was the other way. I was the other way around, you know, facing the other way. Wherever, when he swung it, he went like this. Right. So wherever you were, that's who he got and where he hit you. Right. So, so what, what, and then when he left, he left with a chain rattling while we were scared shitless. We couldn't, we were afraid to come out from under the bed because we thought he was still in the house somewhere. Did you, okay, so did you, after this, do you talk to your parents and do you go like? No. It was not like the kids talk to their parents now. We didn't talk to our parents. But you didn't say like the Krampus, because, so was the Krampus a punishment because you were bad or is the Krampus always there? No, he came, if you got the

Krampus, it was like St. Nicholas. We didn't have Santa Claus. Right. And he was with St. Nicholas. Right. That two of them came together. He didn't come only alone. St. Nicholas isn't such a nice guy then if he's making buddies with the Krampus. Well, that's, that's just the way it was. So, and then we found out after that we were not that bad because we had an orange left and a doll that my mom made herself out of rags, you know, and like I said, the banana went rotten before we would eat it because we had never seen one. And that was our Christmas and on the Christmas tree used to, she used to fry, melt sugar on the stove. I like that. That's sweet. And then she would wrap them in little things and hang them on the tree. Well, by the time, and they didn't put the Christmas

trees up early like they do now. They put them up tonight before on Christmas day evening when we went to bed. So we used to steal all the candy. They must know that you're going to do that. Yeah. Yeah. And so by the time Christmas morning come there was no candies left on the tree. So what happened to them, right? We all Krampus got them. That's what you say. Oh, Krampus took all he was here. Krampus left and we could hear him. The chain rattling going to another house. Really? Yes. Interesting. Do you think that, do you think that it was maybe like all the dads and cahoots on it? And that's what it was. It was all the dads, all whoever in there. You know, they made the deal of who's going to be the Krampus that year.

You think so? Interesting. Yeah. Thank you. And that's Krampus. That's what I grew up. I didn't grow up with fairy tales like they have now. Those soft kids now. Just they just need some love with a chain. Yeah. That's what they need. Thank you. I'll stop recording there. That is amazing, Taylor. I just want to stress that that was banter with my grandmother. I don't think kids need love with a chain. I don't think she thinks that either. Feels important to clarify. Does Grandma Linda tell in her story? Dude, that is amazing. Like, oh my god. She really wants, she really wants everyone to know that it was a big chain. I have no doubt that it's just like a chalky, oh god. At first I didn't believe her. I thought she was kind of telling like a spooky

Christmas story. But then as we chatted it became apparent that like this was like at the time too. Now I think we've kind of come to the shared conclusion that, oh, it was, you know, your dad or his friends or somebody or whatever. And we'll actually go into who portrays the Krampus and why in today's story. What? At the time I remember her not presenting it that way. She presented this as something that it had, like the Krampus got me as a child. Like she still has believed it, which is completely understandable and very sweet to me because it just wasn't something I guess that she'd mentioned among skeptical people before. Well, it's also like when you, when she experienced it, she fully believed that it wasn't a dad in the neighborhood

or whatever. Yeah, when that memory got imprinted, it got imprinted in that way and it's hard to, it's hard to, you know, divorce that and like. So at first we kind of poked fun at her about it a little bit just because, you know, it's, it's, we're family and it's easy to poke fun at one another. Because you can, yeah. That's how, that's how you show love. You poke fun. And then I went through a phase of like, oh, they hit her with a chain. That's not cool. Perhaps I should be more sympathetic. And now I put to bed all of that by digging deep into the lore of the Krampus, and not only the Krampus, but this whole huge cast of characters that exists in the European mountains and comes around in a certain time of year, early December to early January and

sort of pierces the veil and makes Christmas, which in a kind of North American context, we've scrubbed a lot of the ghosts out of it, right? Right, we get the football players to sing. Just like deck the halls. Which was brilliant. But this is a sort of more old school, Germanic, pagan, you know what I mean? That kind of shit. Cobwebs in the, in the windowless cottage kind of vibe. Yeah, yeah. So that's what we're going to dig into today. My, yes, I'm so excited. I'm so like, yay, Christmas, but also like spooky. I am so down and I'm so stoked to hear Grandma Linda tell her experience with the Krampus. Oh my god. So that was a first hand source, first hand account from a Krampus survivor. Yeah, primary, primary source over

here. Look at us. Treasure our primary sources. Research hard, talk to your elders, record your elders. Yes. That's dope. That's so cool. Speaking very broadly, we're going to be talking about a series of folkloric creatures that appear in winter celebrations of all kinds, including plays, festivals, and on special late night runs from house to house, which is probably what my grandmother is describing. Right, okay, yeah. In the Alpine region of Europe, predominantly. So we're talking parts of Germany, Italy, Switzerland, Austria, France, and Slovenia, along with a few other small countries. Okay, so yeah, like the Grimm's fairy tale area, kids are eaten in, yeah. Grimm comes up a lot in researching these topics, because he was the one who sort of like codified a lot of them,

like he made this this tome of them, right? So Krampus himself seems to have his roots in Austria and Bavaria, these creatures, the broader look at these creatures. And I'm going to use the phrase Perkten a lot, P-E-R-C-H-T-E-N. There's a lot of these creatures that you can kind of generally refer to as Perkten, and Krampus is one of them. Is that a German word? Yes. Okay. They draw predominantly from an intermingling of pagan tradition and Catholic morality and iconography. So on one hand, you've got St. Nicholas, and on the other hand, you've got him coming in with the Krampus. And those are kind of from different sources, but because of the intermingling of those cultures in this region, they appear together. You know what I mean? Totally, totally, yeah. Oh,

I love it. Yes! They tend to appear from the beginning of December, around December 5th, which is Krampus knocked, and that is the night before the Feast of St. Nicholas. That's when the Krampus most typically appears until January 6th, a day recognized in the Catholic calendar as Epiphany. I want to emphasize the word broad again, because every small alpine village has its own version of the traditions that I'm going to describe to you. Yeah, okay, yeah. A character who appears in one village's celebration may appear in another town with an entirely different name and motivation. Yeah. Many of these characters share a common ancestor in the lore that has evolved or mutated a different way in Gastein than it did in Tyrol. Totally, yes, I love it, I love it. Folks in one

village may feel passionately that their traditions are the best and look down on any alternate way of doing things. So please know, please know if you're listening to this in like small town Austria, that I'm not speaking in absolutes, as there are many unique and peculiar ways this cast of hundreds appears in various contexts. And are we taking like Linda's line, more or less? Or are you kind of taking, you know what I mean, like grandma Linda has an understanding of Krampus from like a Slovenia, Germany understanding or? Basically, the way that I'm handling it is I didn't predominantly, and when I say predominantly, I mean every single little bit of my research this week came from this book. It's called The Krampus and the Old Dark Christmas Roots and Rebirth of

the Folkloric Devil by Al Riddner. This is the one stop Krampus shop. It has everything. Legit. Cool. Year round Krampus store. 100%. If you have any questions about Krampus or any of the other 8 million folkloric alpine creatures, this book will sort you out. It also has many high, like gorgeous high resolution images of people in costume for these festivals from people in Krampus outfits. There's these other ones that are like these gigantic headpieces made out of stained glass. Some people have like, they're just like 100 pound bundle of straw, because there's all of these different characters, and they're all have these like very, very elaborate costumes, and there's like, like, here's one, you know? Oh my shit, boss. What the, that is amazing. That's

Frau Perkta. You'll meet her later. Hold on. Okay. I'll show you another one really quick. Like here's, here's a, here's a Krampus. That is, what is tariff, and there's like a pope in the back? That's St. Nicholas. Oh, there's, oh. He's not, you know, the Hallmark one, I know. We'll talk about him. Okay, okay. Dang. So these traditions that I'm about to describe to you have at various points been banned, seen as being conduits for violence or subverting the church. Conversely, the Third Reich, for example, held these rural traditions up as heroic, unifying national customs. Yeah, some, like, Wagner shit, yeah. Yep, with specious roots in Nordic myth, because they were always trying to tie everything back to, you know, the master race

and whatever. And so, perhaps because of that, you see a real boom in these traditions in the kind of post-World War II period. Okay. But despite waxing and waning over the years, the isolated geography of the mountains has done much to preserve these rituals. And now, with the release of pieces of American pop culture, like the 2015 Christmas comedy horror movie Krampus, interest has surged and the Krampus and his beastly companions receive more mainstream attention than ever. One last disclaimer, I do not speak German, wish me luck. So before we get into what the Krampus is, let's talk about how he looks. Okay. There are two common depictions of the Krampus. One is the way that he appears on the Krampus Karten, which are essentially

illustrated postcards dating back to the 1800s. Okay. And they depict the Krampus in these drawings. He's a large, sinister looking, hairy, black, bipedal goat figure. Okay. Very demonic. Very demonic. Yeah, he's got he's got Illuminati vibes for sure, the Krampus. Yeah, okay. Often depicted punishing children or lusting after young maidens. His unique distinguishing feature in the Karten is his long pointy tongue, which lolls out of his mouth. Is it like a forked tongue or is it just like a pointy throat? It's like one one stabby point. And it's long and just kind of hangs out. Man, Christmas, baby. The other older depiction is the Krampus as he appears in The Flash, in the plays, festivals,

and traditions that originally immortalized him. Okay. The Krampus in these terms is a man in a costume. Yes. That description does not sell the care and beauty and horror of these costumes. We'll put some images up on the Instagram. You should seek out some seek out some Krampus costumes. They're really, really remarkable. So the Krampus of costumed revelry, let's say, resembles the Krampus of the postcards if he were the lead singer of a death metal band. Gotcha. Okay. The Krampus costume includes a demonic mask, typically with bared teeth or a grim scowl and a scraggly beard, and the horns of a ram or a goat. Maybe they're just big goat horns. They look ramy, but they're probably goat horns. Okay, I'm getting a vivi-itch, the

Vich vibes. Yes, Vich vibes. Vich vibes, for sure. Yeah. Serious performers, of which there are many, will have a few masks that they rotate. Like through the night? I think through the years. I think it's very in the way that if you're a real housewife on the island, you don't want to show up wearing something that you've already worn before. Yeah, yeah. Your g-string needs to change. Yes, day by day. At least breakfast to breakfast. Yeah, yeah. The preferred medium for the mask is Swiss pine, and they typically weigh 15 to 20, uh, 15 to 30 pounds. Fuck. I guess those horns, right? Those horns should get heavy. Yeah. These costumes are nothing to sneeze at, like, kind of physically and logistically in general. Then he has a large, furry costume made of the hair

of four to five long-haired goats. Four to five long-haired goats. That's what, listen, I know you read the book. You read the source material. I, yeah, I'm there with you. And he also has big clonking bells tied around his waist, so you can hear him coming. These are very high quality bespoke costumes. The whole outfit runs, if you were just to go purchase an outfit of this variety and go to, like, the real masters, the whole outfit runs about 1,700 USD with the mask alone costing 1,000. Holy shawl. Yeah, this is some, like, artisan. Yes. Yes. High quality. And you don't want to show, they take, I mean, traditions and doing them in a particular way very seriously in this context. So if you were to show up with, like, some fucking,

I bought a, yes, embarrassing. You would be beaten to death by the crampoos. I bet. Oh, God. So crampoos doesn't talk. He only growls typically. That's terrifying. And he lashes out at his victims, typically disobedient children with a switch, although as my grandmother indicates, this is a farm culture. Big old chain. This is a farm culture, so you might get a chain, a pitchfork, you know, whatever. Yeah. I forgot about the pitchfork and grandma. I like how she's like, you know, like, hey, like, you know what a pitchfork is, Taylor? It's like, I'm a city slicker, man. We didn't have pitchforks in Surrey. She's not wrong. You arrived on the Sky Train. It's true. That's how they delivered me.

Broadly speaking, the crampoos falls into a few subcategories. He, as I said earlier, he is one of the Perfton. Yeah. A group of otherworldly creatures with roots in pagan lore. I'll tell you more about them later. Okay. He's also part of a larger, more culturally diffused group of dark companions of Saint Nicholas. Okay. Characters who appear alongside Saint Nick in various cultural traditions and act as his foil, his servant, or his punishing arm. Crampoos is also what's called a kinder Shrek figure, which is anything that basically steals and eats bad children. Right. Kinder, kid, okay. Shrek. Nam, nam, nam, nam, nam. Figure. Yeah. Yes. We know German. We know German. I know a little bit about German. Every German word is just four

words that they bang together. We're going to figure it out. It's totally true. You just break it apart. Break it apart. So there's a bunch of these kinder Shrek figure that are half fish and will eat you if you get too close to the water or they resemble ravens or they resemble goats. Dude, the past is scary. Some of them are just men with sacks, which probably still exist. That is terrifying. I mean, I'll take a fish or a raven any day. Man with a sack. No, thank you. Frau Perkta, who we'll meet later and who I just showed you a picture of, is a crone who steps kids into a basket. In child snatching, Crampoos has many formidable rivals. But it's not enough to talk about the Crampoos. We must experience him.

So, Josie. Do you want me to crawl under the bed? If you just heard some chains rattling. There'll be a chain coming out of nowhere to slap against my legs because we put storage under the bed. It's going to be a thing. I FedEx Mitchell, a Crampoos costume. I FedEx Batman, a St. Nicholas costume. It's going to be very cute. He would look great. Yeah, a little staff. So Josie, I'm going to take you to a place especially notable for its rigorous and traditional Crampoos culture, the Austrian region of Gastein. Gastein. Gastein and it is known for its naturally radioactive mountain springs. I'm sorry, what? Yeah, I don't know. And apparently it's good.

Like, we like that it's radioactive. Oh, okay. Yeah, I don't know. That maybe explains why all of these strange, strange hairy men are wandering around. Yeah, exactly. That half-man, half-fish scenario is not that far off. So, to answer your earlier question about which line I'm taking on the Crampoos, predominantly because Gastein is sort of this jewel of culture around and it has like a very unique and ornate version of it. That is the one that Al Ridenor kind of uses as his larger case studies for his book and so that's what I'm going to use to. Dope. I'm an Austria baby. So, this is a place where ghosts and werewolves and old spirits still live and mischievous and malicious characters breach the veil between their world and ours every

winter. Let's descend down amongst the snow-capped alps to a darkened village brightened by lanterns and glowing windows and people who have bathed in radioactive springs. Oh god, they're glowing! They're just the brightest of all. It's December 5th, so it's the first night of the Gastein Crampoos Lauf. That means that hordes of roving crampi, apparently the plural, please don't come after me if it's not, have taken over the town square. They clang around, causing chaos, accosting passersby, snatching hats, tossing people around, getting in the faces of small children and making them cry. In the Gastein Valley, they also have this hyper-unique local ritual called the Rempler. The crampoos will bucket each other and slam one another and

generally get like legitimately physical with one another. They just mosh pit. They tussle, but like a hard tussle, like if you were like fight club shit, right? Like consensual violence. It befits the macho swagger of the role. Crampoos is always depicted by a man, a teenage to middle age, and the progression from being a child visited by the crampoos to a teenager portraying him is something of a rite of passage. Well, yeah, you get to no longer be scared, but to do the scaring. With that said, some wives and girlfriends have freely admitted to donning the suit and taking over as the crampoos once their partner got too drunk. Yeah, why wouldn't you? Because like, no one's gonna know it's not. Hunts needs to sleep it off. Yeah, Olga, get in there. Get in there.

This this thing fucking smells like mulled wine. Oh God, but you do it. Once both crampoos are satisfied by a rempler, the custom is to bow, shake hands, and then you either say agvat's vitl game, which means good luck and go forward, or trü dem gutten altem blauch, which means true to the good old ways. Oh, okay. That was that was very guttural, very nice. I try, dude, I try. I know I sound like a pretentious twat trying to do all the voices, but like, the idea I I have a friend, I do a podcast if you're not going to do some voices. I have a friend, he's a sweet southern boy named Caleb, and he got invited to like a crampoos party, because they have these, right? And he was like, I don't know what I'm gonna wear

to Krampus. And I was like, Oh, not Krampus. So I gotta try, I gotta try this party. Yeah, no, that's fair. That's fair. And Grandma Linda, she said it, Krampus. And that's the thing is that like, I, that's how I learned, I learned, I knew about the Krampus before not to be a, a, a cryptster. I knew about the Krampus before the Krampus was cool. And that's how I learned it. No, Nan. That's dope. That's dope. Does Grandma Linda speak German? Uh-huh. Not like she's, she's, so she speaks English predominantly, like I all of my conversations with her happen in, in English. Yeah. She speaks German. She speaks, it wouldn't shock me if she spoke a tiny bit of Italian, because her husband is Italian, but I don't know that for sure. And

then she speaks a Slovenian dialect whose name escapes me. Okay. Which for obvious reasons, she, like I, this is a piece of trivia that I learned about her when we were at the Richmond White Spot, the Richmond Center White Spot. Yeah. Well, that's where you learn about your heritage. That's true. That's true. B.C.'s finest. Okay. So according to Math House Rest, he's an Austrian social anthropology scholar. This is still about the Rempler. My grandfather said that the first time he encountered Rempler, it was 1949. He had never experienced this in his town because there was no other Krampus group and they had no one to oppose. He didn't know what was happening, just that he saw this other guy coming toward him wanting to

attack. So he threw him straight to the ground, which made the other group extremely annoyed. It seemed impolite, you know? On night two, December 6th, we see the Krampus Pass or Krampus troop venture out to the various homes and farms outlying the town square to pay individualized visits from home to home. In Gastein, the Krampus Pass is unusually large and ornate. Most areas will have fewer figures and more streamlined roles with parents stepping in to fill gaps or different characters and different configurations, etc. But in this place, here's what it looks like. Okay. First of all, you need Krampi. Four or more, obviously. One senior Krampus leads the pack. All of this, by the way, is formally unregulated as a point of pride. Small town Krampus performers

are very resistant to the idea of organization as they feel it compromises the spontaneity and wildness of the tradition. Not organic anymore. Exactly. I totally get that. I totally get that. There are small community groups that spend many months preparing, of course, but no governing body. Okay, okay. I mean, those costumes obviously take months and months to put together. And this whole thing is a fucking crazy elaborate production. And then remember that this is only about the Krampus. Pereta has her own shit and everybody has... They have werewolves. There's all this shit that I'm not going into. Oh my god. They have Christmas werewolves. Oh, Christmas werewolves.

If you, in this context, if you are born on Christmas day, that makes you susceptible to becoming a werewolf because that's heresy. This is Jesus' birthday. Love that. That makes total sense. And just the most... Total sense. The most, again, I love the intermingling of this like wild pagan element with just the most Catholic piece of guilt imaginable. How dare you be born on the same day as Jesus. You're cursed for no reason from birth for something entirely out of your control. In your Krampus pass, you've got the Krampi, and then you've got your basket carrier. He is dressed in leaderhosen and covered in moss, of course. Oh, yeah. Of course. As you would assume. Wait, why moss? Because all of the costumes are derived from things that are organically around.

Pitchforks, moss, hay. Yeah, from that deep, thick goat hair. Forest, Germanic forest. Okay. Okay. Yeah, yeah, yeah. What we have at our disposal influences our folklore, right? Our resources influence us in lots of ways. Very true. It's like Poncho Claus, who drives around Houston in a low rider. Precisely. Exactly. So your basket carrier, he has this huge basket full of up to 100 pounds of treats that he hands out to children. Aw. You've got your angel. She's a blonde lady with a crown. Okay. She hands out the gifts from the basket. That's kind of her whole gig. She's Van away, you know? Okay, yeah, yeah. And then, of course, you've got the Krampus' buddy slash handler slash master, good old Saint Nicholas. Okay. So Saint Nicholas, if you've never seen him, he looks like

if Santa Claus were a bishop. Yeah. Yeah. Or like Pope. I guess, yeah, because you showed me the picture and I was like, it's like a chess bishop, like a proper, like he's moving diagonally, for sure. All the time. Yeah. Diagonally in and out of houses. That's what's happening. Yeah. He has a golden book to note the kids good and bad deeds, and he's helped along by the parents in that, obviously. And a little pouch to take donations for the church. Apparently, this is a little bit of a stigmatized role among the performers. Nobody wants to be Saint Nicholas. Why would you want to be Saint Nick? Yeah, why would you want to be the good guy? You don't get to hit any children. So nobody wants, but it goes further than that. You can be a bit of a pariah, like nobody wants

to hang out with him when they're walking from house to house. All the Krampus' are up front getting drunk. Saint Nicholas is sober sister, right? So he has to hang back. And there was a quote in this book to the effect of like, well, if you let the boys decide it would be all Krampus' and no Saint Nick, like... This is kind of a shame because Saint Nicholas is an interesting character in his own right. Oh. Unlike the Krampus' carnival activities around the holidays date back to around the late 19th century, although the mythology that bore him out is much older. Yeah, ancient. The myth of Saint Nicholas goes all the way back to a verifiable historical figure. Saint Nicholas of Myra was born in AD 270 and died on Saint Nicholas Day, December 6, 343. In life,

he was a bishop of the early church. He lived all over. He lived in a cave once. He was critical in shaping the Nicene Creed, which is the defining creed of mainstream Christianity, which regards Jesus as divine and co-eternal with God the Father. Okay, okay. So he's really making the whole Trinity thing the confusing thing. Yeah, pulling the Trinity, getting the band together, you know. Yeah, yeah, good. And then he died, but it's not until after he died that things got really interesting. So Nicholas's bones were interred in a crypt in Bari, Italy, and his bones, due to some strange property of the environment to do with condensation, most probably,

would emit this weird, mysterious, sweet, musky, myrrh-like substance. Ooh, gross. Substance. It was some, some people called it oil, some people called it like mana. Yeah. And so, of course, people took this as a miracle. Of course. And his mythology grew and grave robbers came as they do and scattered his bones to the four winds. And now all of these bones of Saint Nicholas of questionable provenance,

you can find them at various like Catholic museums. You can go to some, somewhere in fucking Monaco or the, I don't know about the Vatican, but like, one of these and find Saint Nicholas's tooth, you know. Right, yeah, yeah. And it's like, that's like not cool that you should, you should repatriate this man's bones. Anyway, even saints, even saints, folks, even saints, even saints run out of patience despite the, the common saying. So the legend of Nicholas grew and morphed from this kind of miraculous bone substance

until it barely resembled the actual man. Oh yeah, okay. I'm gonna pull directly from this book, hold on. Here's a piece of Saint Nicholas folklore. Okay. Set down in the mid-1100s, so we're, we're, it's 1100s. Okay. By the early Norman poet Wase, I hope that's how that's pronounced.

W-A-C-E. That's absolutely correct. Yeah. The story tells of three traveling school boys who stop overnight at an inn kept by a scheming couple. During their sleep, the boys are killed, chopped up, and flung into a brining barrel by the innkeeper who intends to sell the youngsters' meat. Gross. Once a brining barrel gets involved, it's never good.

You, you know. In the morning, Saint Nicholas arrives at the hostelry to accuse the couple of their deed. I guess he just had spidey sense. That's tinkling. He uncovers the evidence and at once conjures from the pile of hacked flesh three intact and living school boys. Whoa. In another story, Nicholas wants to charitably rid himself of inheritance from his dead parents.

That's you doing. He's walking down the road, he's got these two big, his folks are just, they're barely cold in the ground. It is winter, so maybe, you know, things being what they are. He's got these big sacks of money. He's like, well, I really need to get this off my hands and focus in. So he encounters a man who's about to pimp out his virgin daughters because he can't afford their dowry. Whoa, dude.

Yeah. So Nicholas, good guy that he is, he, over the course of three nights, he drops his inheritance in three sacks down this man's chimney in secret. He doesn't tell anyone of his good deed. And that's how we got Christmas gifts. Down the chimney. Down the chimney. Down the, you don't, don't sell your daughters, sir.

There's another way. My parents just died and I'm having a manic episode. I really want to spend some money. Check some shit down your chimney. Yeah. Whoa. Thanks to that legend about the school boys or possibly vice versa. It's so hard to track the etymology of these things, right?

Yeah. St. Nicholas eventually became associated with scholarship, peaty, pedagogy, okay, quizzing students on their facts. We start to see St. Nicholas appearances at boarding schools to, you know, whatever. Okay. And so then this spreads from kind of the church to the urban areas to the rural areas. And in the rural areas, Nicholas gets colored by this mixture of folk Catholicism and indigenous paganism that rain large throughout most of the area's history.

And he gets incorporated into holiday festivities alongside these creatures like the Perikton and the Krampus, you know. And it gets attached to the winter season, the Christmas season because of his death date? Yes. He's St. Nicholas's day. Okay. As far back as 1729, we have a quote from a guy named Abraham Aklara. There are those types who wish to promote themselves as the wonder-working Bishop Nicholas,

who will borrow miter and Vespers coat from the sacristy and thus outfit themselves in good and honorable manner so that children won't be disturbed when Nicholas gets drunk and tumbles down the stairs. Cool. So that's the crew that rocks up to the house in Gastein. You've got your Krampus. Yeah. Krampi, you've got a few of them.

You've got... Terrifying. Heavy masks. Heavy masks, furries. It's, and it's some... Sticky. Drunk. Some teenage kid from the village who's...

Yeah. You would never sit next to him in class because he's... Or some drunk 40-year-old man. It's your like friend's dad. Oh my god. This is terrifying. I really know. No.

But there's the basket carrier who has this big basket full of gifts. You've got your angel who's there to be Vanna White and you've got St. Nicholas. St. Nicholas comes in first and reads a little poem and then the kids sing a little song that they've rehearsed for the occasion. Aw. But all the while, Krampus is waiting outside to come in and wreck shit and they know that because they heard, they're like my grandma, they heard the chains coming up the road, right? Yeah, yeah.

Or the bells on the... The bells or whatever it is. Or whatever it is. Yeah. And this is, is this Christmas Eve or is this in the... This is December 6th. This is St. Nicholas Day. This is the second night.

Yeah. Okay. This is the second night. So this is... Yeah. The first night, December 5th is Krampus Night and then December 6th St. Nicholas Day is when you get this going from house to house and doing these visits. Okay, okay.

So the family in the house waits on one side of a table and that's like a barrier between them and the Krampus. Okay. So Nicholas will leave them a sack full of small gifts. Oranges, gingerbread, dried fruit, whatever. Yeah. Some areas will have little Krampus themed confections like Krampus Cookies. Okay.

The sack, the fact that these come in these little Nicholas sacks was an important innovation. It says Math House Rest, quote, up until the 1970s they didn't have any form of sack. They just filled the whole basket with cookies and oranges and chocolates and then there came a very rainy Krampus Day. So the whole thing turned into this awful slush and the Nicholas pulled out a few handfuls for the children and placed them on the table and there it was. Just awful wet slime. Ew.

Yeah, put it in a... Just put in a ziplock, fuck it, you know? They didn't... They didn't have... My grandma will let you know they didn't have... We didn't have a ziplock back then. It wasn't like that. That's just how it was.

Both ways. It was a ziplock. Fuck. And then Income the Krampi to torment the children, pull at teen girls' earlobes because they're horny teenage boys, rattle the furniture, try to drag the table outside, chase little Linda Mik under a bed and wallop her with a chain. Finally, having survived this brush with the devil, the children presumably chase in for another year, go nurse their fresh wounds and stare at bananas until they rot.

I'm so... I wish she had eaten the banana. Do bananas go off so quick? So quick. But how was she supposed to know that? That's true. That's true. So as I said, this is a very specific version of Krampu's protocol, unique to this place.

In the big city, Krampu's is usually limited to one performer in a large Christmas market to gently terrorize tourists. Right, yeah. Outside of small towns, you can hire a Krampu's and a St. Nicholas to visit your home. Imagine if that were your profession. Great job. Very seasonal. Yeah, very seasonal.

It's one thing to imagine being like a Santa, you know? Like bad Santa kind of situation, but they're just like bad Santa three Krampus. I'm all about consensual ways to get out aggression. It's why I play on a dodgeball team and play violent video games. I think I would draw the line at actually striking the child, but this was this was old school, dude. This was the, we're talking about the 40s.

They were, of course, the hitting children. If you want to invite a Krampu's and a Nicholas to your home, here are some general ground rules, by the way. Oh, okay, good. You may not offer St. Nicholas alcohol. Oh, sober sally. Sober sally. You should lock away all pets because there's going to be a lot of, there's going to be a

lot of, you know, big hairy thing coming in and screaming at action happening. Oh, right. Okay. Well, that's just practical. Yeah. And please no open flames. The, the Krampus is very flammable. All the, the three to four goats would do it.

Well, there's always, even in small towns, there's a lot of like hubbub around like, okay, we're, now that we're getting more tourists who come and get drunk and we need to ban open, we need to ban open flames on the kind of, let's call it the festival route. And then of course all the Krampus speak up, no, we need fire is old way, you know. So it's for real. That's apparently the thing. That's the phrase they say where like, they live by the old way. There we go.

Of course, now that Krampus has gone Hollywood, we start to see more and more non-traditional effects, performances and takes on the Krampus, which right of foul of the traditionalists, they particularly disdain efforts to make the Krampus less frightening, which they call cattle Krampus. Cute, okay. No cattle Krampus here. Oh, oh, oh, oh. We want the hard Krampus.

Says one Krampus past member Wolfgang Poem. I don't want children to be scared, but a Krampus love more like a petting zoo is nothing I enjoy either. A Krampus that's not scary is just a guy in a smelly fur coat. Okay. I mean, yeah, draw your line, stick to it. I, I see that. So perhaps the opposite of the cattle Krampus is the Kraubauf.

This is a regional variant of the Krampus that exists in the Tarol region, which encompasses northern Italy and western Austria. Okay. Okay. Yeah. He's sort of like the Krampus on PCP. That's all Krampus. Rather than the playful violence of the typical Krampus lauf, or even the more

confrontational inter-Krampus violence of Gastine's Rempler custom. Right. The Klibeif, which is the plural. They basically beat the ever loving fuck out of spectators. Oh my God. Expect to get your nose bloodied, your shirt ripped, your face bruised. One teenager was beaten into a coma. Journalists and outsiders are not allowed to participate.

And the Klibeif pass is regarded as a matter of local pride. Okay. Whoa. Says Andreas Kohl, mayor of the town of Matre. Matre? Matre? Mayor of the town of Matre? I'm trying.

I'm Matrean. You really are. You nailed that one. Thank you. Says Andreas Kohl, the Klaubeaufrand is a custom of the citizens of Matre. A custom which we have not allowed to degenerate into a fire spectacle or show for tourists. A custom which is to be preserved in its originality. Whoa, dude.

And that's teens and comas. Yeah, teens and comas, baby. Merry Christmas. Trut du dem Guten alten Blach. Oh my god. All this German male aggression. Well, Josie, I know this story has been a bit of a sausage fest so far. So let me introduce you to some of the women of the lore.

Yeah, boy. One of the most ancient figures in this pantheon is named Frau Perkta. We mentioned her earlier. She's also known as Hulda or Hulda. Although, again, you might find someone who argues passionately that Hulda is a completely different character than Frau Perkta and here's why. I didn't know exactly. Yeah, yeah.

Like Krampus, she's one of the Perkten, although she's considerably more tenured. She dates back to about 1200. Al Riddnor, who wrote this book, refers to her as the egg from which it all hatches. Fuck, yeah. Women live longer than men, too. That's true. That's true. So that would be it, too, yeah.

I assume that's why. Good observation. Frau Perkta is tied to the January holiday of Epiphany. Okay. She's a sootsmeared witch figure who encourages women to do chores, like spinning flax. Well, that's not very fun. Why would you be a witch to do chores? She loves spinning flax.

If there's unspun flax in the home when Frau Perkta visits, she might tangle it up or wipe her ass with it. Yes, yeah. Or burn the hands of the lazy spinner. Frau Perkta is a notorious belly slitter, and then she slips your belly. But you're saying that so casually. Like, oh yeah, no, no, no. This weekend, just did some belly slitting and made some margaritas, cleaned up the garden.

Oh, she's not casual about it, though. She's a very proactive belly slitter. She loves it. It's her calling. You know, you can tell when someone really loves their job. It's that kind of thing. Yeah, yeah. It's just like an aura.

It's a glow. Yeah, it's a glow. It's a real glow. Flax and glow. A flax and glow? Absolutely. So she slits your belly open, and then she fills it with random stuff, like dirt, snow, pebbles, just shit from the ground.

And then she fills you back up. And then she sews you back up. So you wake up in the morning, you're like, my stomach doesn't feel so great. No, you don't wake up in the morning. You're dead. Oh, okay. You're very dead. A poem dating back from, it dates back from between 1050 to 1350.

Okay. And it depicts a perc de like figure stamping on someone. So she's often said appropriately of a spinner to have a single large foot that she uses. Okay, cool. Love it, yes. Single high heel. Here's a bunch of fun etymology all at once. From this large goose-like foot comes the French fairy character named Queen Pebauca,

which is from Pied-dwa, or goose foot, who told stories while she spun her yarn. So right there you've got spinning yarns, you've got fairy tales, and you've got the forebear of the English fairy tale figure, Mother Goose. Perc de like's all kinds of fried foods, which you should offer her, and you should also make sure to eat your own share, because that makes your belly too slippery to slice open. Oh, yes, yes. So there's a way out. There's a way out, and it means that you get to eat fried foods on a cold winter's day.

And that's a beautiful way out. Sign me up. Fill me with fry. Yeah, fill me with fried food instead of like pebbles. But if you still need to spin your flax or she'll wipe her ass with it, that's still not very nice. It's just so rude. It's so, that's so rude. You should also leave milk porridge out for Frau Perkta and her entourage of unbaptised babies

to drink from. Oh yeah, she hangs out with the unbaptised babies. So it's sort of like, it's sort of like what's it called, Santa's Cookies and Milk, but you leave the porridge out, and if you come out, it's been drank. That means that it means something, but the unbaptised babies drink it. Yeah, yeah. That's pretty fucking metal. Imagine an all-girl metal band.

Frau Perkta and the unbaptised babies. Yeah. So good. This would be so, so good, yeah. So Perkta in general kind of surrounds herself with the spirits of those whose lives were left unfinished in some way. So suicides, murder victims, dead soldiers, the unbaptised, etc. Okay, okay, yeah. Many other witch figures draw upon the magical history of the region as well.

Figures like Perkta appear in the accusations made against witches in the 15th and 16th centuries. Okay, yeah. They effectively, most likely, coerced these confessions from these women that they were interloping with Frau Perkta in some way and then used this as a means to punish them, kill them, etc. Yeah, yeah. In Italy's Val di Fiamme, re-enactments of the witch trials appear as part of their holiday celebrations. Whoa, holy schmall.

Italy has its own witch figure, La Befana. And again, she gets sort of conflated with this very Christian mythology. She gets incorporated into the Magi story. Oh, whoa. Here we see her offering the wise men lodgings. They're on their journey to follow the star and visit Baby Jesus Cristo, right? Yeah. They ask her as they're leaving.

Hey, La Befana. They probably would just call her Befana. Hey, Befana. Join us. We're going to visit Be the Fourth Wise Man, basically. And she's like, no, I can't. But then she, so they go, but then she regrets it and sets out on her own. And so she's sort of stuck in this endless twelfth night searching for Jesus on her own,

is her fate. Well, I totally get that. You know that night when it's like, I want to go out, but I don't want to go out. And I'm like, I should, because it's just going to be social. But then you're like, I really want to stay cozy. Then you're like, I want to go. Yeah, but I would need to shower. But my shower pressure, it's been low lately.

Yeah, and it's just like not, and you can't make up your mind. It's just a whole night of indecision. I'm hungry. I'd have to eat before I went out. And then by then, Jesus is already 32. Yeah, yeah. And what do you do? Yeah, I hate that.

So from Frau Perkta, the story sometimes goes, come the Perkton. These are the winter spirits of the Austrian Alps, Krampus included. Okay. They have their own procession, the Perkton Lauf, which includes bizarre figures like the Habergreis with its long giraffe-like neck and hinged jaw. So it's someone wearing a very tall, imagine someone wearing a demon giraffe as their headpiece. There's a real cave drawing near two boulders in the Alps that supposedly depicts the Habergreis. And so the story, whatever it is, it's some sort of abstract animal figure.

And people have decided that it looks very similar to the Habergreis. And the story goes that the devil was on his way to drop the boulders, those two boulders. He was on his way to drop them on a nearby monastery because he's an asshole. This is the devil, an asshole. That's just a total dick move, yeah. Yes, but he was startled by the church bells and he dropped them. And so that's why they're there. This real life cave served as a meeting point for a vigilante group in the 1700s.

And they called themselves the Haberfeld. And they would pay intimidating nocturnal visits to the subjects of extramarital affairs and pregnancies, this sort of thing. And they would come with like guns, firecrackers, whips, drums, horns to make like crazy noise and intimidate people. So much aggression. They took on the guys of the Habergreis who is a figure, a disciplinary figure in the lore who quote, who frightens quoting from David Ridenor, children who torture animals and lazy maids, for example.

Those are two different categories, my friend. No, lazy maids. Oh my god. Torturing animals is, that's another level from the Dust Bunny. In Gastein, which is this kind of central area that we've referred back to a lot. Right. The Perikton Louth might include the Zapfin Mandel or Pinecone Man. But yeah, okay.

He skulks about on your roof. I want a candle. I want a candle scent that is Pinecone Man. I agree, I agree. I agree. This, this is okay. Merch, rich ideas. Apologies, but we gotta, we gotta break for merch.

Pinecone Man? Delicious. I would smell that for days. I, I think this could really work. I think we're in on something. Shark tank it. So the Pinecone Man, funny enough, there's also like a chimney sweep involved.

But I, and the Pinecone Man and the Chimney Sweep both kind of hang out on your roof for some reason, but I don't, I don't even think they're together. I think they're just separate things that both happen on your roof. There might be a lot of room on the roof. That's fine. That's fine. Arrival, the heated rivalry between the Pinecone Man and the Chimney Sweep. It's okay.

So another thing to remember when I'm describing the Perikton to you, it's all of these other weirdos who don't have their own day. They all get today. So not only do you get this motley mix of like, you know, you get your frau perked as, and you get your crampus knockoffs, and you get your Pinecone Man. Yeah. But you'll also like, it sort of turns into this big carnival atmosphere as far as I can gather.

So you'll also have shit like clowns, bra salesmen, like freshest randos, where like, it's, it's a fucking, here's a tonic, you know, like shit like that. Wow. Okay. Yeah. Yeah. The catch all. There's also a, there's the cap wearers and they wear these giant,

they're like eight foot tall hats and they're covered in all kinds of stuff. A doll, a license plate, an entire taxidermied goat. They can weigh up to a hundred pounds and they're supported by a brace of fixing it covertly to the wearer's shoulders. Oh my gosh. Some of these hats date back to 1830 with many passed down family lines. Wow. Here's, here's the family ginormous hat that we keep in the attic.

It's got a goat with a license plate on, but it's a pretty good hat. The, um, the what's it called? So these, these, it's also important to note that like these costumes, in addition to being like incredibly beautiful, like again, if you can track down pictures of this stuff, please do it. They're no joke. Like you can, I remember there was one like crampoose pass who said like,

we're, we're doing seven mile nights in 80 pound costumes. Jesus. Yeah. You're training for this shit. And you're like also probably drinking and you're doing all of this really vigorous performance and you're really hot in your costume, but it's like really cold outside or it's raining or like whatever it is. Yeah.

It's, it's like a, it's a physical commitment being these, these characters, right? Cause like walking around with an 80 pound hat on your head is not something that our bodies are used to, unless apparently you're this person. Right. Yeah. Yeah. It kind of reminds me of a, I dated a Spaniard for a short time in high school, but he and his cousins would always talk about his uncle, their uncles for Easter,

how there would be like big processions where people would dress up as Jesus and carry crosses through the towns and stuff. And like, and they would go barefoot on the street and like, it would just be. Jesus didn't wear Jordans. No, no sir. And just the most grueling, painful thing. Yeah. Yeah.

Just like, wow. Which is again, immensely Catholic, immensely Catholic. Menously Catholic. It's true. It's true. If you're not suffering now, why? Yeah. You're wasting your time.

Do you remember how earlier I said, there were like these people that wore these big like stained glass dealies. With stained glass? They're, they're like, they, they're big head pieces that look for all the world, like stained glass. They're not, but they're equally innate. Like imagine just like the biggest, beautiful, I'm, you can probably hear me flipping through the pages of the book.

I'm trying to find a picture for Josie. Imagine just the biggest, most beautiful, bright mandalas kind of vibe. Whoa. Or like here, here's a good one too. Oh my God. Yeah, they're stunning. Gorgeous. Here's another one.

These in particular kind of have some like Art Nouveau vibes too. Yeah, very that, very that. Wow. Fuck, I'm forgetting how like chilling cold it must be. Oh, we're in the Alps. We're in the Alps in fucking December, baby. Oh my God. Hot chocolate everywhere.

Oh, I just got like a chill. I like need a sweater. This is amazing. Those stained glass things that I just showed you, where those come from is, there was this custom, it's in the 12, so the 12 nights between Christmas and Epiphany. An epiphany. There's a lot of like tradition that's steeped in those times and there's a lot of um,

if you live in this particular village, the superstition is that you have to take down closed lines because ghosts might get tangled in them. If you live in this particular village, the superstition is that you blindfold a gander and put it near and the single women and whoever it walks up to is the next to be married. There's one where you can, if you chop an onion into 12 quarters on the 12 days and you do it just so with the salt or whatever, you can use the pieces of the onion to divine how the specific months of the year will progress. So there's all of this very ornate folklore and so one of the things is this idea of knocking

nights and so what knocking nights were is you'd run around and you'd bang on the barn and whatever noise the animals made if you listened, supposedly you could hear the name of someone in the village who was going to die next year. Oh, shit dog. And so these knocking nights proceed and proceed, but again, it's this, this great mutation of things and into things that in no way resemble what they were, where the Catholic church was like, okay, this is getting a little bit rowdy. We need to recenter this around the idea of Jesus.

And so somehow that turns into these massive stained glass headpieces. This is directly connected to the knocking on the barn. It just turned into that. Whoa. Dude, Catholicism is just such a shape shifter. Oh baby. Of all of these creatures and conventions and traditions, however, it's campus who's exploded in popularity, perhaps because he most unambiguously represents the darkness of the season. Right, yeah.

You don't need to look at him very long to know that he's probably up to no good, right? Yes, he likes to live deliciously. He likes to live deliciously. After all, Christmas is a time of magic, and it then follows that there must be dark magic as well. Speaking about the 12 nights between Christmas and Epiphany, Al Riddnor calls the season a quote, a sort of calendric limbo where one year dissolves into the other and the other worldly leaks into the mundane. Not only does Krampus represent that darker magic, despite appearing earlier in the season,

obviously, he represents a sort of rebellion against the more sanitized western concept of Christmas with its shiny projects and non-threatening monetizable figures. Very monetizable, yes, yeah. And I think that that was kind of, so I did end up watching the 2015 Krampus movie. I don't have much to say about it. I thought it was charming for what it was. I don't think that it particularly represents any of what I've told you. It's not super interested in fleshing out the idea of the Krampus,

other than kind of being a Christmas antagonist, evil Santa, basically. They have things like Killer Gingerbread Man and the Killer Jack in the Box and all of these things that are very overtly about, like a very western, it's a very Americanized idea of the Krampus, right? Yeah. As opposed to when you're really like rolling up your sleeves and getting down into it, it's a lot more about like, well, in fucking 1700, this archbishop said this, and this costume is made out of cow shit because that's what the cow farmer would wear. Right, yeah.

You know what I mean? Like, there's a lot more, it's a lot murkier and it's a lot, it doesn't really have that. Other than kind of some shared ideas of gift giving and St. Nicholas and stuff like that, it doesn't really tie into the American Christmas tradition at all. No, no. I mean, the American one is so, even like an English or a British tradition is like ghost stories, you know, like Christmas Carol, it's like in North America, we just like totally get rid of any type of negativity, any type of darkness, can't handle it. It's funny, Nadine was saying in one of our Halloween episodes, she was saying that at

Christmas, her family was telling ghost stories and you hear these mentions of scary ghost stories and tales of the glories, like you hear like these fucking, these ideas of like, and a lot of that, I think, a lot of what the American version of Christmas depicts pulls from Germany, like all of them, basically all the non-Mariah Christmas carols come from Germany, you know, and Feliz Navidad by Jose Feliciano, other than that, that's kind of all there is. Let's end on one last question. Why? Why any of this? Like, you know the nuts and bolts of why, you know that this guy died and his bones started weeping and that set off a whole chain of events, but why this community

ritual that's so rigorously adhered to and has been for so long? There's a lot of like, one-to-one reasons in the sense that, oh, this character uses, brandishes a switch because that symbolizes driving back the winter or something like this. Right, yeah, yeah. You've got these pieces of explanatory lore attached to these acts, even if not by the villagers themselves, then in scholars who have studied the rituals and hope to come to some sort of conclusions about them. Right, yeah, yeah. As for Al Riddnor, who wrote the book on Krampus. Mm-hmm, literally. I like his answer because he resists attempts at a didactic explanation for the phenomenon. For all the theories, he says, the whole thing may largely come down to, quote,

the human capacity for fun. He says, how can our modern Krampuses imagine that their historic forerunners would be immune to what is so vital, the simple fun of dressing up and smacking people? Yeah. And while that makes me wonder, like, there must be some extended wrestling situation that like, pulls on Krampus. Does that happen? Have you ever seen like a wrestling event that engages Krampus or any of these characters? No, I've never seen, well, okay. Funny enough, no, never Krampus. As to the answer about Christmas and wrestling more broadly, wait till next week's Minifamous. Whoa. There you go. Okay, okay. I mean, nothing, nothing more fun than smacking somebody upside

the head. That's what I'm saying. Dress up, smack people, but, but. I mean, it is Christmas. Families get together. Gotta get that out. Don't use the chain. Keep the chain at home. Yes. Keep the chain in the garage. Yeah. You know, and I think we're talking about like the sanitization of the American and North American Christmas, but we do have negativity in it. It's just directed towards gathering families. Do you know what I mean? Like it becomes this, this idea of like, you got to see that uncle and it's going to be rough and like, that becomes part of the like Christmas. Well, that's foundational. That's foundational to the the movie, isn't it? Like the storyline of the 2015 Krampus movie is this kid,

he's got a shitty family. They're all gross deadbeats. It says extended family comes over and they're all hanging out. And he's this kid, though, he's, he's your textbook, Christmas protagonist. He just wants everyone to fucking feel happy and love each other and know the reason for the season, right? His family are pricks, right? The dad is. The dad is Adam Scott and the mom is Tony Collette and the, the lush aunt is a conchata feral. That's who I remember. His family are assholes to him. So he goes and he makes this sort of impulsive wish of like, oh, I wish that, oh, fuck my family. Basically that wish, right? And Krampus is like, fuck your family. And the movie proceeds from there. Krampus and

all of his baddies kind of attacking this family. And in the end, you know, this, this trial brings everyone together. And, and it's got a really kind of crummy ending that I won't spoil for you, but I was not into it. But yeah, that's the Krampus movie. And it's very about that. The magic of disdainful family. Yeah, yeah. But maybe it's like, maybe if in the Americanized version, it, there was an outlet for that aggression that was just more part of, it wasn't directed at family, but was part of the like this, you know, like getting together and smacking around and eating fried food and getting too drunk. Wiping your ass with some flax. Yeah, exactly. Maybe if we had those outlets, then it'd be like, I can hang out with my mother-in-law. It's fine.

I'll just wipe my ass with all the flax. What a comfort, right? Yeah, I've got on that note, I've got, I want to close this out with the only bit of German that I do know. I don't, you've proven yourself guttural. So this is my grandma used to say this to me some nights to put me to bed. And apparently, and you're going to be surprised as hell to hear this. Apparently, this is from a Mozart, some piece of lyrics and music that Mozart wrote. Okay. It's based on like a good night rhyme that his mother used to sing to his father. And it goes, and my grandma would put me to bed with those words sometimes and it means good night, good night, shit in the bed, and the sheets will roar.

And the sheets will roar? Will roar. That's how my grandma translated it to me, yes. Yeah. Huh, that's beautiful. Yeah. That's, yeah. That's, yeah, that's marrying the tenderness of, of the Christmas season with just the sheer grossness of, of Krampus. I enjoy that. And so it is. So everybody, I hope that you have a very warm, cozy sleep. We are coming to you Christmas Day with our next episode. It would typically release on the 26th, but like who the fuck wants to do that? So Josie. Why? Yeah. Josie is going to be telling us a little holiday story of some kind on that day. And I'm really looking forward to sharing it with you. Don't shit the bed. Don't shit the bed. Merry Christmas, Grandma. Thanks, Grandma Linda. I'm terrified.

Thanks for tuning in. If you want more infamy, go to bittersweetinfamy.com or search for us wherever you find your podcasts. We usually release new episode every other Sunday. And you can also find us on Instagram at bittersweetinfamy.com. And if you liked the show, consider subscribing, leaving a review, or just tell a friend. Stay sweet. Before I say anything else, I want to give a huge shout out to Robert Lee Matt. We had some pretty serious audio issues with this week's recording. And Robert was really instrumental in helping save the audio from the brink. If it weren't for him, you probably wouldn't be listening to this week's episode. So it's a huge debt of gratitude there. The entirety of this week's

research came from The Krampus and The Old Dark Christmas. Roots and Rebirth, The Full War Devil by Al Ridenor. Also watch the 2015 film Krampus. Typically our interstitial music is by Mitchell Collins. This week, it comes courtesy of the 1970s Oakland Raiders. That audio, along with the story of the Minfamous came from Dentzman. The song you're currently listening to is Tea Street by Brian Steele. I hope you're somewhere warm and cozy, safe and happy, and we'll see you on Christmas Day.