Holy Shit, Krampus!

Do you ever feel like there's something missing in the way we teach our children how to celebrate Christmas? We tell them that, if they behave and stop looking through daddy's browser history, Santa Claus will come to town and give them toys and presents. If not, they get a lump of coal.

And some light trauma.

I mean, either way they're getting something, right? And let's be honest, a lump of coal ain't half bad. Just wait until they learn you can set it on fire. That's gonna lead to some entertainment. And possibly tragedy.

The story is incomplete. The good news is that the rest of the story is already out there. In Europe. Alpine Europe. You know, like Bavaria, Austria, and Croatia. They have a figure who works with Santa Claus, taking up the much needed role of the menacing bad cop. And if history has taught us anything, it's that Austria knows how to produce menacing figures.

This particular menace is known as Krampus, and is utterly terrifying.

Light trauma is for pansies.

In contrast to Santa Claus, Krampus visits the home of naughty children to bring them no gifts but torment and suffering to match their misdeeds. The more you learn about him the more you wonder how anyone in Alpine Europe makes it to adulthood without deep psychological scarring.

First of all, Krampus brings a birch switch with him to whip the mildly naughty kids into shape. Corporal punishment. That's not so bad, right? And it's not! At least, not until you learn that the birch is a common phallic symbol in folklore. So in a subtle way, our story begins as a cautionary tale about a demon who will straight up dickwhip your children if they talk back to you.

While making that face.

That's just the kind-of-naughty kids. If you were really bad, your Christmas treat was to be picked up by Krampus' freakishly long, eldritch tongue, slapped into a basket, and carried off either to his lair or to Hell itself, where undisclosed horrors would be visited upon you in retribution for the grief you've caused your parents.

Gosh, Timmy, we'd love to help, but you've been kind of a dick this year...

In case you're wondering (a) where those horrifying real-life images came from and (b) whether this custom of arcane yuletide terror is a mere cautionary tale, I can answer both of those questions at once. Every year, as part of the Christmas Season, young men in Alpine countries dress up as Krampus for a festival that consists mainly of said men scaring the shit out of every child they can find.

So the next time you find that your little boy or girl is unresponsive to the idea that Santa won't bring them exactly what they want if they continue being awful, consider sweetening the pot with a casual mention that the fury of a horned, cloven-hoofed, long-tongued demon is the alternative.

Merry Christmas, everybody!

And holy shit.

Holy Shit, Independence Day!

July 4th is the day when Americans come together and, according to The Simpsons, "Celebrate the independence of your nation by blowing up a small part of it." We celebrate it on the 4th of July because we apparently don't really know what independence means.

Is it the moment the treaty is signed that ends the Revolution in our favor?

You can almost smell their haughty reluctance as they sign away the colonies.

Certainly not! That's September 3rd, 1783. That's a good seven years after we claim our country was born, and as far as we're concerned, September 3rd this year is just another Tuesday

Of course, we all know that July 4th, 1776 was when America voted for Independence. That's the moment, right? That's when we decided that this whole Revolutionary War was for keepsies, and screw the British. Because before that, many of the founding fathers actually wanted representation rather than full independence.

Well, not quite. I mean, that's all true, except that the Continental Congress voted in favor of independence on July 2nd (which is the date John Adams wanted as Independence Day). Thomas Jefferson was chosen to write the document that would officially announce the decision, and on July 4th, he presented one of several drafts to the Congress, who chose it for its florid prose and its proclamation that all men were created equal.

Then everyone signed it and had a beer and shot fireworks.

HA! Right. First of all, they didn't finish signing it until November. Second, remember that thing called slavery? That was still around in America back then, and some people were mighty uncomfortable about that "equality" bit in the draft. So why did they unanimously vote to adopt it?

Because it was fucking hot outside, and there were so many goddamned flies and mosquitoes that everyone wanted to get this freedom thing over with and go home. So after much bickering about who gets what kind of freedom, the less progressive delegates finally just gave up and saved their racism for the Articles of Confederation and Constitution, where they would find a way to both legally define human beings as sub-human and count them as population for the purposes of representation.

Which was just...super uncool.

But still. There it was.

This is a big deal.

 "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal..." One of the most important written phrases in the history of language, and certainly one of the defining phrases of the past 250 years. It's been used as a rallying cry for social progress by everyone from freedom fighters to the civil rights and gay rights movements.

It's an immortal declaration, and at it's core it means that nothing, not even the majority rule of a democracy, can take away your inalienable rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. It means that no form of government has the right to take those things away from you, and if they try, "it is [your] right, it is [your] duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for [your] future security."

And but for the heat and some flies, it may have ended up in an abandoned draft.

Holy shit.

Holy Shit, Lupercalia!

This time of year always calls to mind certain old traditions that surround the concepts of gender interaction and fertility. I speak, of course, of Lupercalia.

Season's Greetings!

Lupercalia was a Roman holiday celebrated on February 13th-15th back in the day. By "celebrated," I mean, "Men got bare-ass naked and ran through the streets whipping people." No really. That's how it was done. Roman holidays were hardcore.

It's just how they rolled.

The naked men dancing through the streets may have donned wolf skins (though not enough to cover any important bits of their physique), and they whipped anyone they encountered, especially women. Women ran away in terror at the horrifying display. Just kidding, they scrambled to be among the lucky ones to receive the lashings.

You see, the point of this orgiastic parade, and the point of most pagan holidays, centered around a very crucial concept:

This guy.

Babies. Specifically, the creation and delivery of babies. Pregnant women who were whipped by naked men during the incomprehensible sausage-y festival of Lupercalia believed their pseudo-violent encounter would bless them with a safe and peaceful labor. Non-pregnant women believed, and let me lay out these details carefully lest we forget, that a naked man smacking them with a whip would magically grant them a superbly fertile womb.

Ancient fertility drug?

Like most awesomely bizarre pagan festivals, Lupercalia was doomed by the rise of Catholicism. Some say (without any tangible evidence other than the convenient date and...you know...fertility...) that Valentine's Day was meant to replace it. More likely is that the convenient date was just a coincidence, since Valentine's Day had nothing to do with romance or fertility until about a thousand years after Lupercalia was abolished.

The point, though, is that Romans were weird. Don't think modern society is going to get off easily. We have weird enough festivals that we'll get into later.

But running through the streets in the buff, merrily whipping willing young women?

Holy shit.