A Very Scary Christmas

A Christmas Bestiary is an illustrated guide to those nasty things that go bump in the night during the frigid days of December, torturing or, at a minimum, badgering those kids who were “bad” during the previous year. Santa Claus is not coming to their town As writer Benni Bødker and artist John Kenn Mortensen explain in their new collection, there are plenty of malevolent critters roaming about to take care of any misbehaving imps on Santa’s “naughty” list.

The Fantagraphics’ version of A Christmas Bestiary is a reprint of the 2017 book originally published in Denmark and translated into English by Christopher Sand-Iversen. A handsome 112-page hardback, the book features profiles of two dozen beasties that show up around Christmastime, with text by Bødker and gorgeously-grotesque, Gothic-styled pen-and-ink drawings of each mythical monster by Mortensen, whose artwork resembles that of beloved 20th century illustrator Edward Gorey, with a little dark, psychedelic influence from Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll creeping in around the edges of both prose and pictures.

Bødker and Mortensen draw upon the folklore and mythology of a number of European countries to offer as expansive a collection of trolls, goblins, and anthropomorphic animals that plague children and their families in both their Danish homeland and much of Scandinavia, but also Germany, England, and France; as far east as Russia, and south to Greece and Italy. Each entry offers a succinct description of the beast and why it’s bad news for anyone it visits, accompanied by a “Danger Level” as registered in pine cones (one cone = relatively wimpy, as monsters go; five cones = hide under your bed) as well as handy “Survival Tips” so that you can escape an interlude with any of these varmints relatively unscathed.

German/Austrian folk legend the Krampus has become a veritable cottage industry these days, with numerous books, greeting cards, posters, t-shirts, and even scary movies based on the creature’s mythology. Bødker classifies the popular Yuletide boogie-man as a category five threat, especially on “Krampus Night” (December 5th), when the Krampus runs amok, tearing up Alpine towns and villages in search of bad little kiddies that they can transport back to their lairs for unspeakable acts of, presumably, non-PG rated cruelty. Bødker’s Krampus survival tip is “no skiing trips in the Alps in December,” dubious advice at best. Maybe the Krampus just have a better publicist than their fellow beasties, ‘cause for my money, the hoary five-cone-rated Icelandic troll Grýla and her wayward sons are a far more villainous threat to a child’s well-being.

Grýla–a perpetually-hungry sorceress with three heads and an unsatiable yen for “naughty children stew”–sports fifteen tails, each of which holds a sack that can carry up to 15 kids that she spirits away during holiday festivities. If that wasn’t bad enough, she is the patriarch of an extended family, with her sons The Yule Lads creating mischief in the thirteen days leading up to Christmas.

Sure, these guys are, collectively, only two-cone threats, but there are 80 of ‘em on the team, and they sneak around at night slamming doors, peering in windows, and snatching sausages meant for Christmas dinner. Even Grýla’s pet gets in on the action; The Yule Cat searches for human vittles among the lazy and slothful. A house-sized, four-cone-level feline, you can easily avoid The Yule Cat with the receipt of a new pair of socks for the holiday. Bødker’s advice for surviving an encounter with the evil Grýla and her kinfolk? “Stay away from Iceland entirely during December.”

There are other five-cone threats among the pages of A Christmas Bestiary, but none are as scary, perhaps, as the Scandinavian myth of The Wild Hunt. Wandering ghosts who claim any food that hits the floor under the table on Christmas Eve (there’s evidently no ‘three-second rule’ in Denmark…), if they don’t get the grub, they’ll grab you instead! Described by Bødker as “a group of grim figures ride on black horses with red hot eyes…the riders are all the undead. Brawlers, drunkards, fraudsters, and other ne’er-do-wells who aren’t good enough to enter the pearly gates of Heaven, but aren’t bad enough to go to Hell.” Adding a Norse mythology twist to the narrative, Asgardian godfather Odin often leads The Wild Hunt, creating an eerie folk tale that may have inspired J.R.R. Tolkien’s Nazgul riders in his Lord of The Rings novels.

A Christmas Bestiary has its share of mildly-threatening one-cone creatures as well, tho’ it seems that a number of them work for Santa Claus in some manner or another as a sort of bad-beastie work release program. The Germanic Knecht Ruprecht, for instance, accompanies Saint Nicholas on his journeys and asks children if they’ve been good through the year and know their prayers; the good ones get presents or sweets while the naughtiest get whipped with a birch twig.

The Basque Country (Spain and France) myth Olentzero is a sort of proto-Santa with a red nose and beard who spends his time in his mountain abode whittling wooden toys to give to children in the surrounding villages. The oddest of Santa’s assistants may be Père Fouettard, admittedly a three-cone menace who hands out chunks of coal to naughty children, an act forever immortalized by Charles Schulz with 1965’s A Charlie Brown Christmas TV special.

In between the largely-benevolent one-cone critters and full-blown, five-cone monsters are a number of twos, threes, and fours like the Russian Baba Yaga, Poland’s Gwiazdor, Demark’s The Gloso, and the Scandinavian Yule Goat, among others of various sizes, shapes, and national origin. Bødker and Mortensen present all of these folk tales in a whimsical, tongue-in-cheek manner, making A Christmas Bestiary a quick, albeit entertaining read, the book a perfect holiday gift for that hard-to-buy-for name on your list who would appreciate the tome’s tales of wintertime troubles and Yuletide terrors.

(Fantagraphics Books, October 31st, 2023)