Every year around this time, he visits the homes of young children around the world under the cover of darkness, there to determine who’s been naughty and who’s been nice — and which reward or punishment should result from that summary judgment.
No, we’re not discussing sunny old Santa Claus, or St. Nicholas as he’s known in Old World parlance. We’re talking about his horned and tongue-wagging half-goat, half-demonic helper.
Krampus.
Lowell Brower, a teaching faculty member in the Department of German, Nordic, and Slavic+ who regularly teaches a class called “Supernatural in the Modern World,” calls Krampus “everyone’s favorite Yuletide sadist.”
“Krampus embraces the transgressive, threatening, death-dealing aspects of informal vernacular culture and embodies the liminality of a season where people prepare for, and creatively confront, the discomforts, deprivations and cruelties of winter and death itself,” Brower explains. “To me, this profanity-spewing, child-kidnapping, flesh-eating, goat-horned demon highlights humanity’s endlessly creative and existentially healthy ability to laugh in the face of death.”
Krampus originated in the folklore of places like Austria, Switzerland, Alpine Germany and Croatia. In these cultures, on the fifth of December, also known as Krampusnacht, Krampus tags along with St. Nicholas, beating misbehaving children with birch sticks or, in some cases, kidnapping them in his sack and devouring them. He’s the evil yin to Santa’s jolly yang.
But he’s not just some ancient piece of folklore used to frighten children into good behavior centuries ago — he’s also a growing modern phenomenon. More and more communities across the United States are hosting annual Krampus-related events, including Milwaukee, which hosts a parade and festival in its beer district, and Madison, which hosts a Dachsland Krampuslauf event in mid-December. Los Angeles hosts an annual Krampus Rumpus, and it’s almost always a sellout.
Brower and his wife don horns and faux-fur coats for Wisconsin’s Krampus-related events each year. Every December, Brower’s social media feeds are routinely filled with a steady stream of #krampuschallenge content from around the world, from makeup tutorials to explainer videos.
"It's no wonder Krampus is thriving in the digital age," Brower says. "He's inherently viral — after you've seen him, you simply need to share him with your friends."
Tom DuBois, the Halls-Bascom Professor of Scandinavian Folklore, Folklore, and Religious Studies, notes that Krampus is certainly not the only dark and evil holiday figure in European folklore. DuBois points to Grýla, an Icelandic ogress who snatches children on Christmas Eve and plops them into stews, and Stallu, a malevolent giant in Sámi culture who also loves to snack on misbehaving kids at holiday time. His sleigh is pulled not by reindeer but by rats. These figures have made a lasting impression on generations of Northern Europeans.
“When you interview people who are elderly in a country like Finland, for instance, they’ll say how scared they were at Christmastime, because it wasn’t certain that you had been good all year,” says DuBois.
For DuBois, this aspect of Krampus is an example of folklore’s sometimes ruthless ability to exert social control, giving parents a vivid means to terrify their children into obedience. Let’s put it this way: Being thwacked or devoured by a horned demon-goat is a lot more effective (and potentially traumatizing) than the threat of receiving a lump of coal in the stocking.
Krampus’ goat-like appearance is both a symbolic callout to the time of solstice and a nod to Christian iconography that casts the goat as an image of the Devil. Brower nods to this with his students, teaching about Krampus in relation to the litany of festivals that celebrate world-upside-down transgression — think Mardi Gras and Halloween — that also mark times of transition and uncertainty. Scholars call it festive inversion.
“During liminal moments of transition, we can turn expectations upside down,” says Brower. “Because we are acknowledged as being in the in-between, we’re allowed to act like tricksters, or like goat-horned demons.”
Brower also appreciates the way Krampus offers a compelling alternative to what he terms “the institutionalized, consumeristic, merry-and-bright culture of the contemporary American Christmas season.”
Whether you embrace and revel in the liminal chaos Krampus brings to the Christmas season or choose to ignore it (or run screaming in the opposite direction), there’s no question he’s a powerful (and furry) example of the enduring power of folklore.
“Folklore is like this resource that people sometimes revive and put a new twist on or take in new directions,” says DuBois. “And part of its appeal is that it connects back to antiquity, but it also has a meaning for the people here and now. They’re having fun, and they’re connecting with their heritage.”