This Week In Awesome - Holiday Edition

In recent years, the holiday monster known as Krampus has reached breakthrough-meme-status as folks across the Internet have fallen in love with the terrifying quirkiness of the Western European horned beast. The Krampus acts as a kind of heel Santa Claus, as instead of rewarding good children with presents, he punishes the bad ones, beating them with switches, or possibly even tossing them in a sack to eat them once he gets home.
 
Like the best Christmas traditions, Krampus springs from pre-Christian rituals and beliefs, and likely shares its roots with satyrs, horned gods and other nature-based deities. The Catholic Church did their level best to get those pagan Europeans to quit revering horned goat creatures, but thankfully, Krampus endures.

 

When I was a kid, my family learned of a charming old world German Christmas tradition involving a blown glass pickle ornament. On Christmas Day, my folks would hide the ornament somewhere in the boughs of the Christmas tree and whoever found it first got a special present of some sort. It's like using hide-and-seek to further spoil your only child.

But the most interesting part about the German Christmas Pickle Tradition is that it's almost certainly a piece of invented faux-lore. Putting aside the fact that presents in Germany don't show up on actually Christmas (and oftentimes come with a horrifying goat monster), the tradition itself appears to be completely made up by a savvy American importer out to make a buck off of German ornaments. It's like the Paul Bunyan of Christmas traditions.

Catalonian feces traditions

For reasons that are both unknown and unfathomable to me, Christmas traditions in the Catalan region of Spain seem to revolve almost entirely around human excrement. First up is the adorable and somewhat disturbing Tió de Nadal, which is more commonly and appropriately known as Caga Tió, or "shit log." Like some type of googly-eyed totem, the log is left food beginning in early December, all the way up until Christmas Day, when a family's children chant a song and beat the log with sticks to force him to crap out presents for them.

Even more bizarre than the Caga Tió, however, are the Caganers. While the figurines can be based on anything from cartoon characters to political figures, and vary wildly in appearance, they all have one thing in common: they're in the middle of popping a squat and dropping a load. Opinions vary regarding the meaning and purpose of Caganers, and whether they are some type of humanizing element of a holy scene, or just a bit of off-color fun, but any excuse to place a defecating cartoon character next to the three wise men counts as awesome in my book.

These days, most people's concept of wassailing is taken from the song "Here We Come A-Wassaling," and accordingly, it's seen as nothing more than an antiquated term for caroling. But like Krampus, wassailing has its roots in pre-Christian Europe, and was originally a way for peasants to get money from their feudal lords in exchange for the blessings of their underlings.

However, the most important part of wassaling is, of course, the wassail. With a base of cider, wine, beer or mead, and mulled with spices, fruits all sorts of other goodness, wassail is a hot beverage perfect for keeping yourself warm as you go stomping around in the cold, trying to sing songs you don't really remember. Wassailing is basically just C.U.I. (caroling under the influence, natch).