Last holiday season, my family entered the danger zone. My
9-year-old nephew, a video-game addict whose bottom must surely be fusing to
the couch by now, was asked to feed the dogs. An hour went by, and the bowls
went unfilled. Someone made a vague reference to a watchful Santa, and without
pausing his game he threw a side-eyed glance and muttered something like, “You
don’t really expect me to fall for that one
anymore, do you?”

More troubling: the 3-year-old niece had a nasty habit of
getting out of bed and sneaking into her parents’ bedroom to watch cartoons. I
was on the phone with her mother when she detected the
distinct sounds of “Phineas & Ferb”
emanating upstairs. Mom reminded her precocious daughter that if she kept
misbehaving, Santa would take all of her presents and give them to other
children. The response, verbatim: “Mommy! Santa better not give any of my toys to other kids!”

And just like that, The Santa Threat no longer worked. The
9-year-old is understandable; that’s about the age kids figure out that the
elves probably aren’t pumping out Nintendo DSes and iPads along with rocking horses and dollies. But a
3-year-old no longer cowed by the idea of Santa skipping her stocking? I can
remember sobbing as a 5-, 6-, 7-year-old, my parents bellowing that Christmas
would be cancelled if my brothers and I didn’t clean up our disaster area of a
bedroom. Were my parents more terrifying than parents today? Are modern kids
tougher? And if we give up on The Santa Sanction, what hope do the parents of
this nation have in keeping their hyped-up kids in line during the holiday
season?

The answer may lie in the distant past. Shortly after the
niece’s cartoon tantrum, my roommate introduced me to Krampus,
an archaic Eastern European holiday icon he heard about via his hairdresser.
(It’s always the hairdressers.) According to folklore, Krampus
— a terrifying goat-man hybrid that looks like, well, Satan — used to pal
around with St. Nicholas during the holiday season. While St. Nick gave
presents to the good kids, Krampus would threaten and
punish the bad ones. Sometimes he would beat them with birch rods. Other times
he’d throw them in a sack and drag them to the pits of Hell. Krampus did not mess around.

One quick Wikipedia search later I
knew Krampus was the answer. “This will make them
clean their rooms, and be polite and respectful,” I thought. “This will make
them cry.”

I know what you’re thinking: what kind of sicko advocates
terrorizing little kids? But the truth is, humanity
has a long, rich tradition of scaring the bejeezus
out of children for their own good. Consider fairy tales. “Hansel and Gretel” teaches kids not to be greedy. “Pinocchio” warns about what
happens when you behave like an ass. “The Three Little Pigs” imparts important
lessons about sound mason work. You get the picture. Most of the classics have
been cleaned up for modern audiences — they used to be much more graphic in the
old days — but the moral lessons remain. Be good, lest you get eaten by wolves
or some other terrible creature.

It’s no different with Krampus, or
any of his creepy holiday brethren. That’s right: there’s a whole bunch of anti-Santas who allegedly tormented naughty children in various
regions of Europe for centuries. My favorites include:

-KnechtRuprecht, typically
associated with 17th- century Germany.
Legend says that he was an old man who would test children about whether or not
they could pray. Those who could pray got nuts, gingerbread, and fruit; those who
couldn’t were given crappy presents like stick or stones. Or he simply beat
them with a bag full of ashes.

-La PereFouettard,
or “The Whipping Father,” from 12th-century France.
He dispensed lumps
of coal and floggings to the naughty children while St. Nicholas handed out
gifts to the well behaved.

-Black Peter, from the Netherlands.
Peter is tough to describe. There are some uncomfortable racial associations, and
in modern times he apparently has been recast as some kind of jester. But
here’s something that might spook the kids: Pete apparently used to snatch up
bad children, throw them into a giant dufflebag, and
smuggle them off to Spain.
But really, who’s going to turn down a free trip to Spain,
kidnapped or not?

There are others, but I’m sticking with Krampus. For one thing, he’s the scariest and most
effective. And also, there’s an underground pop-culture movement to bring him back into the spotlight. He was referenced recently on “The Venture Bros.” cartoon and by
Stephen Colbert in his 2009 holiday special. There are YouTube videos of young
Eastern European guys holding festivals in his honor, where they make Krampus costumes and chase and beat passersby with huge
sticks. Last year, I even found Krampus brew in the
fancy international beer section in Wegmans. He’s a rising star, and I am
totally riding on his evil coattails.

This year I started introducing Krampus
to the kids during our Halloween pumpkin-carving party. They were barking out
demands and grabbing equipment with nary a please or thank you in the mix. I
brought up that Christmas is coming, and that this year, Santa might bring a
friend with him. That friend, Krampus, doesn’t like
kids who don’t use their manners, or don’t listen to their parents. In fact, he
takes bad kids, puts them in a sack, and whacks them with sticks. And he
watches them all the time, just like Santa.

Suddenly the “pleases” entered the conversation. The whining
stopped. My sister-in-law said that apropos of nothing, last week the
now-4-year-old asked about Krampus. She’s not
necessarily scared, but she seems wary, perplexed. The experiment is working.
I’m planning to kick things up a notch by handing out Krampus
dossiers for the Thanksgiving road trip to grandma’s house. (I’m leaving out
the pits-of-hell part, at least for a few more years. Baby
steps.)

A few friends have reacted in horror to the plan, and
truthfully I get their point: it is mean
to deliberately scare children. I love my nieces and nephews dearly, I really
do. But they can be insufferable when the mood takes them, and if these
cautionary tales worked on our great- great- great-grandparents, why not use
them now? The carrot no longer works, because at least in our family, the kids know they’re going to get presents under
the tree, no matter how obnoxious they are. So now we’re trying the stick. And
if those YouTube videos and folk tales are to be believed, nobody works a stick
like my man Krampus.

This article appears in Nov 17-23, 2010.