Krampuslauf

krampusAt a work gathering, we played a game that involved discovering Christmas facts about your co-workers: their favorite movie, Christmas song, holiday tradition and so on. It was a fun way to get people interacting at the party as teams competed for prizes.

The question about me? My favorite Christmas character — and naturally, the answer was Krampus.

I had to explain Krampus to most people. “Oh, he’s St. Nick’s demon sidekick. He comes for the bad children and carries them away.”

“What does he do with them?”

“Well, he drowns them, or eats them — sometimes he just takes them off to Hell.”

And at that point, most holiday revelers slowly backed away.

So, as you can imagine, it brought me great Christmas joy when the New York Times ran a big story about the revival of Krampuslauf in Bavaria. It’s an annual festival that celebrates the hairy and horned scourge of misbehaving kids, and it sounds like a blast. Forget Oktoberfest, I want to go to Krampuslauf!

There are tons of videos of Krampuslauf events online; this is one of the crazier ones:

Yes, all the best things about Halloween and Christmas rolled into one. This is something we really need around here.

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