The Dead of Winter: Beware the Krampus and Other Wicked Christmas Creatures

by Sarah Clegg

This other Lucy is nothing like the demure, sweet victim of the hagiographies or the pure, white vision I’ve just seen outside the cathedral. Instead, on 13 December, she is said to ride through the skies with a cavalcade of the dead, of ghosts and, sometimes, of children who died while still unbaptised. Going house to house with her terrifying entourage, she looks for the food that has been left out for her. If all is well, she’ll eat the offerings and bring good fortune in return, and if she encounters any good children on her way she gives them treats. But if the food offerings are incorrect or forgotten, and if Lucy finds that the tasks of the household – especially those related to weaving – have not been finished and laid aside for her celebration, she brings disorder, bad luck and death. If she finds children who have misbehaved, she’ll gut them, pull out their organs, stuff them full of straw, and sew them back up again. Sometimes she’s depicted holding a distaff with a child’s intestines twined around it, an impressive combining of the normally very separate interests of cloth-making and disembowelling. Inevitably for a Christmas monster, guisers used to dress as Lucy, going house to house veiled and wrapped in white sheets, holding knives and empty bowls which they cry to be filled with blood and guts. Hideous, haggish and often sporting an enormous nose (sometimes represented as a cone that covers her face entirely, so she looks like a creature from a Dr Seuss-b...