So it‘s Christmas again, and I would like to share a family story with you. It happened long, long time ago but it is still a vivid topic in our family each Christmas.

My roots are in a central German family which was not particularly religious. But we sang traditional German Christmas songs and followed the traditions.
The traditional Christmas Eve celebrations stopped for me for a period after my marriage to Mohamed. He knew the traditions, tolerated them but still, that tree thing seemed very outlandish to him.
After a few years, we had two children of kindergarten age, a boy and a girl, and were living in the Bavarian Alps in Southern Germany, where Mohamed worked as a hotel manager. Our children, now old enough to understand, expected us to celebrate Christmas just like everyone else. The hotel hosted a Christmas celebration for its guests, complete with a Santa Claus, so I asked Mohamed whether he could bring the Santa over to our home to distribute presents under our tree.
Just after nightfall on Christmas Eve, I realized something was missing for our Christmas dinner, so I quickly ran to the nearby supermarket. When I returned home, I found my children in tears. Papa had arrived, not alone, but with the hotel Santa Claus, well, yes. The children hadn’t even seen the beautifully decorated and lit Christmas tree, the presents under it when entering the sitting-room, or even Santa himself. Instead, they were faced with THAT CREATURE, — an ugly beast, rattling chains and insisting in confessions whether the children had been good all year round or not, so he could punish them or not.

The room was filled with an eerie silence, the children were very scared. And Papa Mohamed was irritated by Mama's reaction. What was his mistake ? He had taken the people over from the hotel as requested.
I yelled at the man behind the costume: "Who the hell are YOU ? Here with the Santa ?" - He asked me to follow him to the kitchen, put his arm, with loud laughters, around my shoulders, then told me with artificially deep voice in his Bavarian dialect: "I'm the KRAMPUS", don't you little Prussian girl know that ?" I couldn‘t stop myself from laughing too. I didn't know that. I’m from the North, a Prussian. There was no Internet that time. We only knew a certain „Weihnachtsmann“, a Santa Claus.
The children calmed down when Santa Claus and his ugly pal had left, and we all opened our presents. We had a nice Christmas after promising them only a good Santa Claus to be allowed into our home in future. We couldn‘t tell them that both men were just in costumes.
The KRAMPUS is a tradition only being followed in allemanic culture, in Southern Bavaria, Austria and Switzerland.
This story is re-told whenever we have a Christmas gathering in the family. Those two little ones so scared by the KRAMPUS are now in their fourties and have children of their own.
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