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NEW YORK – There’s a dark side to Christmas. It’s kind of inevitable, really; darkness is at its heart. The holiday’s origins go back more than 10,000 years, created to mark the time when those living in the northern hemisphere experience the shortest days of the year and thereafter begin to gain a little bit more sunlight each day on the journey to spring and summer. The chilling aspect of Christmas isn’t just the cold, and never has been. After all, one of the greatest tales of the season, Charles Dickens’s A Christmas Carol, is, unmistakably, a ghost story.
Entering the cultural consciousness roughly around the same time as A Christmas Carol was Krampus, a creature who inspired dread and terror in the naughty children of 19th-century Austria and southern Germany. Early depictions on Krampuskarten (Krampus cards) show him as a hairy, soot-blackened, Pan-like figure, but as time passed, Krampus came to resemble the devil of the Christian religion, with red skin, horns, and a sneering face. He takes his name from ‘Krampn,’ a Bavarian term for something that is shriveled or dried out. But as fearsome as he is, he never appears on his own. He is firmly tethered to St. Nicholas, serving as the yin to the jolly old elf’s yang: Santa Claus and anti-Claus.