olive, the other reindeer
A few months ago, visiting scholar Sonja and I were talking about undesirable nicknames. I told her about a college friend we dubbed “Schmutzee.” Her eyes lit up as she told me about Schmutzli, the “goon” who does the dirty work alongside the Swiss Santa, Samichlaus. Schmutzli literally means “the little dirty one,” and his role traditionally includes beatings and kidnappings. In some cases, parents warned, he would take bad children into the woods and devour them. I did some more digging into this and in Europe there seems to a diverse array of Santa henchmen. However, back here in America, our Santa sometimes hands out coal, but he’s generally a jolly dude. We didn’t really have a Christmas goon until Dr. Seuss introduced The Grinch in 1957.
And as the years have worn on, the violent stories about holiday goons has tamed a bit. Schmutzli has laid off the beatings and the cannibalism. Austrian Krampusumzüges (the runnings of the goon Krampusse) used to feature violent acts with chains, but now provide reason for kids to smile.
What’s shifted in western culture? We used to provide horrifying stories for kids, but now things seem to be warm, fuzzy and edifying? At worst, they’re just dubious and weird. What gives?
Not sure why we don’t try to terrify our kids any more (see? things aren’t getting better). As far as Santa’s companions go, I don’t know why they may not have crossed the Atlantic, but I’m sure they don’t survive today because many of them are somewhat to overtly racist, like Zwarte Piet, Santa’s black servant who kidnaps bad children and brings them to Moorish Spain.
This post reminded me, as I see it reminded Ken-ichi, of racism in Santa stories. David Sadaris wrote an essay about the Dutch Santa, Sinterklaas, called “Six-to-Eight Black Men”. An excerpt:
The full text is here or here. If you enjoy David Sedaris, you can hear him reading the essay here.