Every December, greeting cards appear featuring a horned devil carrying a birch switch and a basket of naughty children, grinning from beneath a pair of goat horns. The cards are usually designed to look vintage, carrying the tone of something old and European and slightly menacing in a festive direction. They are called Krampuskarten, Krampus cards, and they have been circulating in the Alpine regions of Austria, Bavaria, and the surrounding countries since the early 20th century.
The figure on the card is real in the sense that matters: Krampus is a genuine figure from Alpine folk tradition, not a modern invention and not a marketing gimmick. But the card version, jolly-sinister, safely contained within the Christmas season as the dark companion of St Nicholas, tells only a small part of a considerably older and more complicated story. Understanding where Krampus actually comes from means going back further than Christmas and deeper into the Alpine winter than the greeting card tradition suggests.
Before Christmas: The Perchten
The Alpine winter in the centuries before Christianity arrived was understood as a time of genuine danger and genuine supernatural activity. The days shortened until the sun barely appeared. The mountains closed in. Communities that had been connected by summer roads were cut off by snow. In that darkness, in the tradition of the communities who lived there, things moved.
The Perchten were those things. The word refers to a category of masked, costumed figures connected to the goddess or spirit known as Frau Perchta or Berchta, a powerful Alpine deity associated with winter, domestic order, the spinning of flax, and the wild hunt. The Perchten divided into two broad types: the Schonperchten, the beautiful ones, who brought blessings and good fortune, and the Schiachperchten, the ugly ones, who drove away evil spirits and whose presence was threatening rather than benevolent.
The Perchtenlauf, the run of the Perchten, was a procession of costumed figures moving through villages in the deep of winter, wearing elaborate hand-carved wooden masks and animal skins, ringing bells, making noise, driving darkness and malice from the settled spaces of the community. It was loud and deliberate and somewhat frightening, which was the point: you cleared the winter darkness by confronting it, by making enough noise and enough organised movement that the things lurking in it had no choice but to move on.
Krampus belongs to this tradition. His name derives from the Old High German krampen, meaning claw, and possibly also from a Bavarian word meaning something withered or lifeless. He is a Schiachperchte, an ugly Perchten figure: half human, half animal, horned, hairy, cloven-hoofed, with a long tongue and chains that rattle as he moves. He predates his association with St Nicholas by centuries and has a function in the winter tradition that is independent of any Christian calendar.
Frau Perchta and the World Krampus Came From
To understand Krampus properly it is necessary to spend a moment with Frau Perchta, because she is the figure at the centre of the tradition he belongs to and she has been almost entirely displaced from popular consciousness by him.
Frau Perchta, whose name means the bright or shining one, was a dual-natured Alpine goddess whose domain covered the Twelve Nights between Christmas and Epiphany, the Rauhnachte or rough nights that were understood as the most spiritually active period of the winter year. In her beautiful form she was a radiant woman in white robes, a protector of women, children, and the souls of the unbaptised dead. In her terrible form she was an iron-faced hag with a hooked nose and a webbed foot, who inspected households for signs of idleness: if the flax had not been spun and the house had not been cleaned, she opened the bellies of the lazy, removed their organs, and stuffed the cavity with straw.
The belly-slitting detail sounds extreme until you understand its context. Frau Perchta was not primarily a monster. She was a winter authority, enforcing the rules that kept communities alive. Wool needed to be spun before winter set in. Houses needed to be in order before the dark months isolated them. The agricultural year had specific obligations attached to it, and those obligations had spiritual weight. Frau Perchta was the enforcement mechanism, and she rewarded the diligent as lavishly as she punished the idle. Her tradition was not simply about fear. It was about the serious business of surviving winter in an Alpine community.
The Perchten who accompanied her processions, including the figures that would eventually become Krampus, operated within this framework. They were expressions of the same understanding: winter was a time of genuine danger, both physical and spiritual, and the community needed to meet that danger with organised, ritualised force.
What the Church Did With It
When Christianity spread through the Alpine regions, the Church faced a problem that it encountered throughout Europe: deeply rooted folk traditions that had been serving their communities for generations and that were not going to disappear simply because a new religion arrived.
The solution adopted in the Alps followed a pattern used across medieval Europe. The figures could not be made to vanish. They could be reframed. The Perchten, who had been ambivalent forces of nature, both beautiful and ugly, both blessing and punishing, were pushed firmly into the ugly category and subordinated to Christian authority. By the 16th century, figures that had once been independent winter spirits were being described as Christian demons. Their long fur and wooden masks were replaced in imagery by shorter hair, cloven hooves, claws, and the sharp features associated with diabolic iconography. They were made subservient to St Nicholas, the 4th century bishop of Myra whose feast day falls on 6 December.
The pairing was useful for both traditions. St Nicholas needed a counterpart: a figure of reward needs a figure of punishment to make the system work, and the Church had no native Alpine embodiment of Christmas-season threat to offer. Krampus, already established in the Alpine winter tradition as a punishing, frightening figure, fit the role. He was given a new job description without losing his old appearance. The chains he carries, which in the older tradition were understood as tools for warding off evil spirits, were reinterpreted as the chains of the devil. The birch switch was added as a specific instrument of punishment for naughty children.
Krampusnacht, the night of December 5th, became the occasion when Krampus accompanied St Nicholas on his rounds. Where Nicholas left gifts for good children, Krampus threatened the bad ones, in some versions carrying them off in his basket to be taken to his lair. The partnership of saint and devil, goodness and punishment, was a Christian framework imposed on something that had operated quite differently before Christianity arrived.
The Krampuskarten and the Near Disappearance
The greeting cards that made Krampus internationally recognisable began appearing in the early 20th century, when the tradition of sending illustrated Christmas cards had spread from Britain across Europe and publishers in Austria and Bavaria began producing cards featuring local seasonal figures. The Krampus cards were immediately popular, combining the festive atmosphere of Christmas with a dose of mild menace that sat well with the dark humour of Central European folk tradition.
They also nearly disappeared. The Catholic Church had always been ambivalent about the Krampus tradition and had made several attempts to suppress it over the centuries. In the fascist period of the 1930s in Austria, the Krampus tradition was actively discouraged and in some areas banned, both because of Church pressure and because the authorities considered the rough street behaviour of young men dressed as Krampus unsuitable for a modern society. The tradition survived in rural areas and in private practice, but it was significantly diminished by the mid-20th century.
The revival came gradually in the latter decades of the 20th century and accelerated in the 21st, driven partly by renewed interest in regional folk traditions, partly by the craftsmanship revival around the hand-carved wooden masks that are central to authentic Krampus costume, and partly by the internet’s ability to spread unusual and visually striking folk traditions to audiences who had never encountered them before. By the time Krampus appeared in American cinema in the 2015 horror comedy of the same name, he had already been circulating in North American popular culture for several years, with Krampuslauf events appearing in cities across the United States and Canada.
What the Krampuslauf Actually Is
The Krampuslauf, the Krampus run, is the modern expression of the older Perchtenlauf tradition and deserves description on its own terms rather than as background to a general point about Krampus.
In the Alpine towns and villages where the tradition is strongest, typically in the first two weeks of December and particularly on the evening of December 5th, groups of young men dress in elaborate Krampus costumes and process through the streets. The costumes are not cheap shop-bought devil outfits. The masks are hand-carved from wood by artisans who have learned the craft from their families, and regional styles vary enough from village to village that an expert can tell approximately where a mask was made from its features alone. The rest of the costume is typically made from animal skins, and the whole ensemble can weigh twenty kilograms or more.
The participants ring large bells, rattle chains, wave birch switches, and interact with spectators in ways that range from theatrical frightening to physically demanding. The tradition has always involved a degree of sanctioned roughness that makes it genuinely different from the polished performance of most modern folk festivals. The Krampuslauf is deliberately uncomfortable in a way that connects it to the older function of the Perchtenlauf: noise, confrontation, and organised disruption as a way of marking the darkness of the season rather than simply decorating around it.
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Sign up here →What He Actually Represents
The version of Krampus that most people outside the Alpine tradition know, the festive villain in a Christmas moral framework, is real but incomplete. The older Krampus, the one who comes from the Perchten tradition rather than the St Nicholas tradition, represents something more fundamental and more interesting.
Alpine communities faced winters that were genuinely dangerous in ways that most modern people do not experience. Cold that could kill livestock and people. Isolation that could last for months. The failure of crops or the failure to prepare adequately before the snow came could mean genuine catastrophe. The Perchten tradition, including the figure that became Krampus, was a way of acknowledging that danger ritually and collectively. You did not simply endure the dark months. You confronted the darkness, made noise at it, organised against it, and emerged on the other side with something demonstrated about your community’s ability to face what the season brought.
The greeting card version of Krampus, charming and mildly threatening in a festive direction, is not wrong exactly. But it is the surface of something that goes considerably deeper into the Alpine winter than Christmas does.
