Lost in transit

Christmas Season

Sometimes it's hard to keep track of the Christmas season traditions here, especially as they gradually inflate.
First we celebrate Krampus and Nikolo some time in the first week of December, I think around the 5^th (Krampus) and the 6^th (Nikolo). Nikolo is the good guy, the bishop, where you put out your shoes the night before and he fills them with sweets, or at our house, peanuts, tangerines, a few sweets (usually chocolate Nikolos that look suspiciously like left-over Easter Bunnies wrapped in new foil) and underwear. Is there a patron saint of underwear?
Krampus is Nikolo's devilish sidekick. He goes around beating bad children. Our youngest daughter Gamma, aware how naughty she is, has been terrified of him ever since we explained to her what his function is. Kids would get coal, I suppose, or nothing at all really, since Nikolo is the day for the small presents, although women might be given naughty lingerie for Krampus, combining the underwear theme of the following day with the naughtiness inherent in Krampus.

Then there are the advent calendars. They are there to remind you how few days you have to get your presents organized. My kids don't have one advent calendar each, they have four: one put out by local advertisers, with a discount coupon behind each little door (numbered 1-24 and opened one a day starting today. Today it was free frames when you buy lenses at the optometrist), a big one with bits of chocolate behind each door, another one from their local grandparents, and others I'm not sure of.

This morning, the kids got up for breakfast and there their big advent calendars were, waiting for them on the table. "Who brings the advent calendars, anyway," I asked my wife. "The Christmas badger?"

Finally, Christmas comes twice in our house, allowing us to sort of skirt the debate of who brings the presents, an American Santa Claus or the Austrian Christkind, which translates as "Christ-child" but is actually a young female angel in a golden robe, with golden-blond curly hair and so on, as one can see from the pictures, advertisements and the college student part-timers handing out junk at the malls. At our house, the Christkind brings the presents in the evening of the 24^th: the kids are locked out of the living room, then a bell rings and they enter to see a tree covered with real candles, all burning, and presents piled around under the tree, and their dad standing nearby with a bucket of water.

(I was just talking to a friend who told me that when she was four, their apartment was completely gutted by fire one January when she begged her mother to re-light the candles and she did.)

Then, on the morning of the 25^th the kids get up and find more presents under the tree (mostly the stuff sent by relatives from the States), and a plate with a few crumbs on the windowsill and an empty glass and a thankyou note from Santa for the cookies and whiskey and a gnawed-on carrot (for Rudolph).

I'm leaving out various masses and family visits, which are usually good for a few laughs.

Posted by Mig at December 1, 2004 08:47 AM