Gay Santa posts sleigh every December, it seems social media has anointed Krampus as the new queer icon of the holidays. For the uninitiated — or those who haven’t seen the 2015 horror film Krampus — this mythological figure is “a half-goat, half-demon, horrific beast who literally beats people into being nice and not naughty,” as National Geographic puts it.Marked by horns, fangs, a devilishly long tongue, Krampus carries around birch rods with which he swats the misbehaving.(And this is where some of the social media users quoted might say, “Yes, daddy.”)For centuries in parts of Germany and Austria, Krampus has been positioned as the anti-Santa, a menace who carts naughty kids down to the underworld when he shows up on Krampusnacht, the night of December 5.In this century, however, Krampus has become a pop-culture fixation.
