Christmas Monsters: Krampus and the Dark Spirits of Yule

· 54 min·

Before Christianity softened it, before Victorian sentimentality gilded it, Christmas was something else. Something that came out of the dark on the longest nights of the year, and did not always come kindly. These creatures are not invented to sell merchandise or frighten children into behaving. They are thousand-year-old answers to a real terror: the darkness of a midwinter night that genuinely killed. Every valley in Europe gave that darkness a face, because a monster with rules can be bargained with — and a formless darkness cannot.