Merry Christmas! Happy Solstice! Io Saturnaia! While I no longer participate in Catholic mass for Christ, I enjoy Christmas as an idea, a ritual, with all its pomp and bombast.
But I can’t help but notice the darkness within Christmas’ heart. Perhaps you feel a lurking Holiday dread, reader. Fear of large crowds, overstimulation, and rejection from the tribe.
This post is for you. Lean into the dread and let us discuss the horrors of Christmas.
Books
The Christmas Beastery
Illustrator John Kenn Mortensen | Writer Benni Bodker
Fantagraphics, 2023
This week, I considered the Christmas Beastery, which brilliantly illustrates Christmas horror. A beastery is a collection of monsters, and Christmas has a surprising amount of them. Naughty children, beware: Christmas is a time for PUNISHMENT!
Mortensen’s pen and ink illustrations use shadows to hint at an inescapable void: darkness under the bed where monsters live. Each line is used to etch ancient demons that cannot die, surviving the centuries to terrify children.
Santa Claus has a barely concealed eerieness, watching us sleep, judging the children, and forcing his elven slaves to make toys. That horror is literalized in Krampus, the most popular Christmas monster with his big-budget Hollywood adaptation (sellout). I love how Mortensen represents the many regionalizations of Krampus.
But there are more monsters I’ve never heard of, like the Icelandic Grýla, a gigantic troll sorcerous who carries 15 sacks on her tail to carry children’s bodies to her cave. A Christmas feast!
Or the French Père Fouettaro: he’s Father Whipper! He hides in the shadows and beats children with a cane. I find this illustration deeply unsettling.
The beastery even includes little monsters, like the Kallikantzaroi, little werewolves that come out on Christmas, squeeze through the chimney, and steal all the food.
Even The Wild Hunt, from Denmark, Norway, and Sweden, has a Christmas connotation, where undead riders on black horses with red hot eyes storm the town, eat the food, and torture the children. Sounds like a Davos Conference!
This book is amazing. If you like Krampus, folklore, pen and ink illustration, or if you are a TRPG dungeon master writing a Christmas campaign, this book is for you. I read it from the library on Hoopla, but I will buy a copy.
All I Want For Christmas is Utahraptor
By Lola Faust 2023, Independently Published
Shifting gears into Mormon Raptor Romance. I saw this pitch-perfect Harlequin cover parody and had to read it. I stayed reading about the strange world where humans and dinosaurs live in harmony and sometimes mate together, an anti-Jurassic Park. As you’d expect, the steamy descriptions are very amusing or likely very erotic to some readers.
Consider this Christmas Kiss,
Of course, most of humanity rejects Raptor Romance. They cannot admit the truth: love is love. But Holly Hottie and Rocky Raptor prove the bigots wrong.
Lola Faust has published a dozen more dino-romances in case you try this one and find out it’s you need more. A perfect XXXmas read with an 8.5/10 heat level fireplace.
Film
Eyes Wide Shut | Dir. Stanley Kubrick | Warner Brothers
My favorite holiday movie is Eyes Wide Shut, wrongly read as a Christmas movie. The rituals therein predate Christ. Eyes Wide Shut is a Saturnalia movie, just as Christmas is the Christianisation of Saturnalia, Rome’s feast to Saturn, the God of Agriculture.
Every twelfth month in Rome, “slaves [had] license to revile their lords.” In the film, consider Bill is the slave, and when he sees the orgy, he’s reviling his lords. In 217 BC, the Phoenicians conquered the Romans at the Battle of Lake Trasimene, and the Romans adopted Greek rituals into the holiday, particularly cult sacrifices to Baal. That’s what the cloak people are doing in their Long Island mansion. We sublimate brutal Pagan holidays in Christ, just as our Puritanical overlords kept what the patricians do secret from us plebs. An Eyes Wide Shut party is a modern invocation of the leader’s urge to meet under candlelight, wear cloaks, and do sex-magik-murder.
Some allege Kubrick got killed for making this movie. Maybe so. Yet a quarter-century after release, billionaire sex cults are common. Multiple presidents and Congressmen were probably at that orgy party in the movie. The Epstein case opened all our eyes wide shut: we know the truth, but there’s nothing we can do about it.
I enjoyed Hot Star’s recent analysis of Eyes Wide Shut, where he speculates which lines were overdubbed by the studio and why (spoiler: Prince Andrew).
https://thehotstar.net/eyewidedubbed.html
Pile of the Week:
The Boxes in My Parents’ Basement
In my parents’ basement are boxes of books I like well enough to keep but not display in my piled-pilled apartment. Piles of Vertigo comics, alt-lit, David Foster Wallace, book-noted literary classics that are indisputably good, but why would I display a $0.99 copy of Candide covered in highlighter? Why do I keep them? To see how my brain develops over time is what I tell myself each week as I write and consider my reading piles.
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