#Creepmas Day 6: Books Featuring The Darker Side of Christmas



If you are interested in the darker side of Christmas I highly recommend these three. I read and enjoyed each one immensely.

The Old Magic of Christmas explores many myths and legends associated with the winter holidays- witches, ghosts, elves, fairies, and more. I had no idea there were so many dark legends associated with the winter holidays. Modern times sure have made the holidays shiny and cheerful compared to the dark and scary things they used to be.

Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas explores old traditions, dark art, strange holiday postcards, and weird customs of days gone by. Wow, there is some weird stuff in this book. You'll love it. 

The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas digs into the history of Krampus and the way the mainstream has embraced the subculture. If you are interested in Krampus, this is the book for you.



The Old Magic of Christmas: Yuletide Traditions for the Darkest Days of the Year

'Tis the Season for Witches, Elves, and a Legion of Ghosts

Not so very long ago, Yuletide was as much a chilling season of ghosts and witches as it was a festival of goodwill. In The Old Magic of Christmas, you'll rub elbows with veiled spirits, learn the true perils of elves, and discover a bestiary of enchanted creatures. Rife with the more frightful characters from folklore and the season's most petulant ghosts, this book takes you on a spooky sleigh ride from the silvered firs of a winter forest to the mirrored halls of the Snow Queen. Along the way, you'll discover how to bring the festivities into your home with cookie recipes and craft instructions, as well as tips for delving more deeply into your relationship with the unseen.

Christmas Curiosities: Odd, Dark, and Forgotten Christmas 

Oh, by gosh, by golly. It’s time for . . . rowdy bands of drunkards roaming the streets, lighting firecrackers, and firing off guns? Gangs of masked youths invading people’s houses, demanding food, drink, and money—and threatening to break the windows (or worse) unless they’re given what they want?

Welcome to Christmas, circa 1800. Yes, the season of light, joy, and gift-giving was once regarded as a time of darkness, danger, and dissipation—and celebrated with all-too-public displays of noisemaking, inebriation, and gluttonous overeating. (Well, maybe not everything has changed.) And though we tend to imagine Victorian-era Christmases as sentimental gatherings around the candlelit tree, blazing hearth, and festive punchbowl, the 19th-century evidence tells us quite otherwise.

Drawing from his extensive collection of antique postcards, greeting cards, advertising giveaways, and other ephemera, author John Grossman presents a picture of Christmas past that, frankly, looks a lot more like Halloween. Broomstick-riding witches and vampire bat–borne cupids deliver New Year’s greetings. Fur-clad fairies gather ’round a campfire to roast their Christmas dinner—a huge dead rat. And Saint Nicholas? He’s that skinny guy in the bishop robes who arrives with his dark companion, the Devil-like Krampus brandishing switches to punish the badly behaved.

With Christmas Curiosities, STC wishes you a very merry, very scary Christmas.

The Krampus and the Old, Dark Christmas: Roots and Rebirth of the Folkloric Devil


The Krampus, a folkloric devil associated with St. Nicholas in Alpine Austria and Germany, has been embraced by the American counterculture and is lately skewing mainstream. 

The new Christmas he seems to embody is ironically closer to an ancient understanding of the holiday as a perilous, haunted season. 

In the Krampus' world, witches rule Christmas, and saints can sometimes kill.

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