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Krampus — Description

Devils come out to dance on December 5. In the shadow of the Alps, where Austria meets Germany, Saint Nicholas's arrival is preceded by a parade of pariahs. The bells toll at twilight, the air stinks of alcohol, and caprid creatures crawl into the streets for one hell of a holiday. In Tyrol, they're known as Klaubauf, in Salzberg they call them Toifi, but most today know them by what was once a lesser title: Krampus, derived either from the Bavarian word “krampn” meaning “desiccated/deathly” or the German “kralle” meaning “claw”. Under their moldy furs and twisted horns, these grotesque monsters at the beck and summons of the jolly old saint are actually something far, far more deplorable, vile creatures from the depths of Hell fueled by nothing else but primal destruction and a taste for mayhem: plastered college students. My gods, I'm shivering just thinking about it.
This chaotic festival, defined by costumes, rough-housing, booze, and other shit you'd expect from a citywide frat party, is the Krampuslauf, or “Krampus Run” in English. It's a yearly event hosted in many southern German towns the night before Saint Nicholas's feast day, and is either fucking lit or a menace to society depending on how much of a square you are. It's a sort of reverse-trick-or-treating thing where dudes dressed as Saint Nicholas go door to door bringing gifts to kids while an entourage of his minions threatens mayhem if they misbehave. The horrendous monsters these drunken Deutsche dress as are an evocation of the mythical Krampus, a type of devilish creature making up Saint Nicholas's posse, dealing out punishments to naughty children because Nick is too much of a gift-giving pussy to do it himself. The Krampus usually accomplishes this with a good ol’ fashioned whackin’ stick, and then stuffs the little brats into a giant bag. What gruesome fate befalls the squirmers afterwards slides on a scale from getting straight up eaten to being dragged to Hell depending on how much of a dick your parents wanna be when telling the story. I mean I certainly can't think of a single good thing that's ever happened to me as a result of being stuffed into a giant bag. Last time that happened, I woke up in a vat of vampiric banana slugs with nothing but a box of uncooked spaghetti and a taxidermy fish full of magnetic putty to escape with. Man, last Friday night was wild.
So uh… how did we get here? Not the costumed college kids, that's the fairly straightforward consequence of German drinking habits. I mean what's the actual deal with Krampus? Most of us with a passing familiarity with this creature can sum up our knowledge with “Oh yeah, he's like that evil Santa thing right? I think I saw that in a shitty horror movie once”. You might of heard that Krampus has pagan origins, or even seen it passed around online that he's a child of my favorite goddess Hel, lady of the Norse underworld. The first half of that is… kinda true? Not really? We'll get into that. The second half is just complete bullshit. As far as I can gather, that little bit of lore was made up entirely by fantasy author Gerald Brom in 2012. No, sadly, I'm sorry to spoil the fun again, but Krampus's relationship to historical Heathenry is tangential at best. If we really wanna get to the bottom of this character’s origins, we gotta dig into a niche corner of German Catholicism, when the devil was quite literally put on stage.
Pageant plays about the legendary life and deeds of Saint Nicholas have been performed in German-speaking corners of Europe for about a millennium now, our oldest playbook surviving in an 11th century manuscript from Hildesheim. These were entertaining, and gave plenty an actor the chance to ham it up as the cartoonish stock devils which the embodiment of holiness was to vanquish. These stage performances had some fierce competition, though, in the form of the Perchtenlauf (“Perchta Run”), a raucous parade of drunken fucks in horned demon costumes aesthetically indistinguishable from a modern Krampuslauf. How old this wintertime tradition really may be is kinda up to how speculative you wanna get. On the farthest extreme, Caesarius of Arles wrote complaining of peasants getting dressed up in animal skins and antlers like filthy pagans on the Kalends of January all the way back in the 6th century, but his account lacks proper nouns and specific details. Though the figure of Perchta is attested as far back as Burchard of Worms in 1020, we don't get a direct reference to her visage being purposefully evoked in costumed procession until 1668, when some guy in Lienz named Peter Ackherer took one of the revelers to court for beating the shit out of him. Lmao fuckin nerd.
So okay, but who is Perchta? Well lucky for you, I've already done a blurb on her! See “Huldra the Belly-Slitter” so that I don't have to repeat myself. To briefly resummerize, Perchta (called Huldra or Holda in more northern regions) is some kind of elvish spirit held over from some obscure Heathen context, associated primarily with winter rites and defined by contradicting dualities. She is said to possess both inhuman beauty comparable only to the stars above, and frightful ugliness fit only for the lowest troll. This conflicting nature is also reflected in her personality as well, rewarding hard work and social order with bountiful gifts and a shower of kindness, while punishing laziness and rule-breaking by torturously disemboweling those who displease her. In other words, it's the perfect set up for a bogeyman story to scare your kids into shaping up and flying right, a role we first see her utilized in by 1750 with the publishing of the woodcut Die Butzen-Bercht, wherein she's stuffing kids into a giant bag for some undefined crime. I'm sure the little ankle-biters had it coming.
Now, since getting drunk and running around in pagan costumes is always going to be hella more awesome than some dumb church play, Perchtenlaufs were a serious threat to authorities wanting to keep the Christ in Christmas and all that. The event was so overwhelmingly popular, in fact, that even Santa himself got in on the party. In the 17th century we got Abraham of Sancta Clara bitching about how Saint Nicholas performers had to be supervised during the parade lest a kid witness Santa fall drunkenly down their stairs like a total lightweight. This was most unorthodox hbhbhbhbubhbuhh! Throughout the 18th century, various cities in this portion of the Austro-Hungarian Empire tried to outlaw the parade, but lol good luck telling a mostly rural population of German farmers that they're not allowed to get shitfaced. Realizing the flaw in this logic, authorities had to reach a compromise. Fine, they said, you can have the Perchtenlauf, but can we at least cut out the more overtly pagan stuff guys? It's not a good look, especially after the Protestant Reformation went down and every denomination really has to start pulling its weight in the branding department. Like just replace the elf queen with the devil character from the Nicholas plays so that we don't embarrass ourselves in front of the Lutherans, k?
The result was a fusion of the Saint Nicholas pageants and the precession of devils, now held on the same night, with old Nick literally directing the activity of these… uh… well not Perchta now. How bout… uhhh… Krampus? Yeah that works. When exactly the word “Krampus” first appears as a substitute to Perchta has been a fucking pain in my ass to track down. I imagine this is one of those things that'd be much easier to research if I spoke German and had access to resources published in that language. The closest thing to a concise number I've come across is 1862, when a Christmastime newspaper got published in Budapest under the name Krampuszok after the creature, whose first illustrated appearance was drafted just three years later. By the 1880s, the postal service had become one of the only things in the Austro-Hungarian Empire that actually worked, allowing for the mass distribution of so-called “krampuskarten”, literally “Krampus cards”, holiday greeting cards with a Halloweeny twist. This is the mechanism by which an otherwise obscure alternative name for the creature gained its modern uniformity, though the parades themselves remained extremely local events out in the countryside until the Internet came along and started stumbling upon these freaky Christmas cards with what appeared to be the Devil stuffing kids into bags. It's not difficult to see how counterculture gobbled that shit up, finding an outlet to turn Christmas into something more metal for the more alternative crowd. Giving the finger to the Man and the consumerist pig they've turned Santa into has pulled Krampus out of obscurity and across borders. Apparently, right here in my beloved home state of Indiana, the college town of Bloomington hosts one of the country's largest modern Krampus troupes, which is horseshit, because I never got to see this event when I went to school down there! Mind you, it starts at 8, which is usually well after I go to bed, because I had to be up at 4 in the morning to drag my ass three blocks down the road and participate in an absolutely grueling art class I barely remember anything from. As is a common pattern in my life, my atrocious schedule and lack of a social circle has prevented me from participating in anything cool. I could've been one of those drunken college students flipping over cars in an overblown gorilla costume goddammit! My life sucks.
Design notes, this isn't my first draft of Krampus. Originally, I wanted to make him more of a creature, some kind of weird bipedal goat thing hauling a big ass sack around or even incorporating it into his biology like some kind of fucked up marsupial, but I just couldn't get it to look right. It just kept lookin’ like some goofy ass Santa-themed Pokémon. So, I did away with that route, gave him clothes, and made him much more elvish in stature. As you can probably tell, my design philosophy ultimately shifted to finding the halfway point between my design for Santa and my design for Huldra. Was that a little less creative of a thought process? Maybe, but I really really like how this came out in the end, so I'm not gonna get too hung up about it. Either that, or I just really vibe with elves and’ll take any excuse to flesh out the Queen's court. I like to imagine Krampus is just another flavor of unhinged lackey she loans to Santa as part of whatever deal they have that got a sweatshop contract signed with her labor force. No matter how jolly you are, sometimes you just gotta whip out the whackin' stick.